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Updated Monday, October 8, 2007 0:00 am TWN, By Karl Malakunas, AFP

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China offers surprise hope in climate change fight

YANQING, China -- Teenager Zhu Xiaotong’s home a few hours’ drive outside Beijing is a world away from the acrid air and snarling traffic jams that have come to dominate China’s energy hungry capital.

Cherry tomatoes, capsicum and spring onions rise up from a little garden patch that forms the centerpiece of her family’s brick courtyard home, while a solar panel heater ensures the Zhu’s have warm water even in winter.

Zhu, the 19-year-old daughter of cabbage farmers, has also for the past few months cooked the family meal in their sparse kitchen on a new eco-friendly stove that burns crop waste ultra-efficiently instead of noxious coal.

“There was a lot of smoke when we burnt the coal, but now there’s no smoke at all. Coal smoke used to make us cough,” she said on a recent clear sunny day at their home in Yanqing, a picturesque farming district.

The Zhu family stove, in fact, is being held up as a symbol of what many may be surprised to hear — that China could be one of the world’s saviors in combating global warming.

Former U.S. vice president Al Gore recently presented Chinese firm Daxu, the makers of the stove, with an Ashden Award, a high-profile British honor that promotes world-leading sustainable technologies.

China’s environment is undoubtedly under unprecedented pressure as its 1.3 billion people rush to live modern, Western lifestyles, and it continues to rely on global-warming culprit coal for 70 percent of its expanding energy needs.

In fact, China has quickly caught up with the United States as the world’s biggest emitter of the greenhouse gases that are blamed for global warming.

But China is also quietly emerging as a global force in renewable energy technologies, from big-ticket items such as wind and solar power to small products like the Zhu’s stove.

This is being driven by strong government policies, its own vast market and businesses seizing opportunities in a fast-growing global industry, according to the China program manager for Worldwatch Institute, Yingling Liu.

“China has the potential to be a world leader in the renewable energy sector,” Washington-based Liu told AFP.

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