China's Policies in Response to Global Warming

The documentary The Inconvenient Truth provides us a very detailed description of the challenge that all the whole human beings are faced with --- global warming. The average temperature of the earth has risen dramatically during the last decades of years, which has never happened in the history of human beings. If this trend continues in the future, it will cause an irretrievable disaster. Being aware of the importance of this problem, many countries have formulated their respective plans in response to the problem.

The core issue of global warming is the dramatic increase of the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. The reason of this dramatic increase is high energy consumption which causes large amount of greenhouse gases to be emitted into the atmosphere. China, as one of the most rapidly developing countries, also has the highest energy consumption. Thus, China’s policies in response to global warming would be of vital importance to the world’s effort to reduce global warming. As one important measure to reduce the emission of greenhouse gases, China has increased the tax of coals. Coal is the supporting energy of China; therefore this measure can effectively reduce coal consumption in China. As a result, a large proportion of carbon dioxide emission would be cut off, which is a significant contribution to reducing global warming.

However, increasing coal tax cannot eliminate the root of overemission of carbon dioxide. The determining policy is to invest in R&D to search for new techniques to increase the efficiency of energy sources, as well as to reduce total energy consumption, rather than purely reducing coal consumption. Although this policy requires large amount of fund and large number of highly educated people, once we find out a new technique to reduce energy consumption or increase efficiency of energy sources, this technique would be adopted widely by industries worldwide, the effect would be revealed immediately in several years. Global warming would be reduced significantly.