Ignoring the obvious bias of the author, I will address some points:
In spite of its unequivocal accomplishments and successes, China has, during the past decade or more, spawned a mountain of bad debt, unprofitable and uncommercial infrastructure and real estate, empty apartment blocks and little-used apartments and transport facilities, and excess capacity in, for example, coal, steel, solar panels and electric vehicles.
The author fails to see the bigger picture. Empty houses built when labor is plentiful become occupied eventually. See Pudong, once a "ghost city", now has a population of 5 million. Infrastructure which doesn't directly pay for itself does so indirectly. It should be obvious that extra capacity in solar panels and electric vehicles has potential to be a very good thing.
China’s leaders have been vocal this year about strengthening consumption and about improving the business environment for private firms and entrepreneurs, who have been pressured or punished to align their commercial interest with the party’s political goals.
Oh no, how dare the government force their interests on the poor businesses.
Yeah, we should be building all the solar panels and wind turbines we can build, whether it makes sense economically or not. As long as you can put them somewhere to generate clean energy instead of fossil it's a positive for humanity.
So its alright as long as you aren't directly affected. Lets push it all onto desperate economies to mine the earth and bear the brunt of pollution while I enjoy the clean air and pristine water bodies.
We can either keep pumping oil and burning it, or we can mine some stuff to build panels that last 10+ years and can be recycled at the end of their lifetimes. It's not like fossil fuel extraction is a clean process (both in ecological and humanitarian aspects), in addition to cooking the planet.
This is just a silly argument. We're already polluting those countries anyway with the current fossil fuel regime. We're already putting massive quarries for the minerals currently needed for energy generation and transmission there (coal, copper, gold, etc). We're already prospecting those countries for oil and gas. We're already chopping down rainforests to get to all these resources, not to mention to clear land for cattle grazing for the titanic meat industry.
Mining has to be done somewhere to create a decent standard of living (though Western lifestyles require exponentially more resources than those elsewhere so we can make improvements on the demand side of things). What isn't set in stone in that the extraction of resources has to be exploitative for the people living in those countries, nor that it has to be excessively environmentally damaging. Which it currently, absolutely is, because the capitalist profit motive dictates it to be so.
Ignoring the obvious bias of the author, I will address some points:
The author fails to see the bigger picture. Empty houses built when labor is plentiful become occupied eventually. See Pudong, once a "ghost city", now has a population of 5 million. Infrastructure which doesn't directly pay for itself does so indirectly. It should be obvious that extra capacity in solar panels and electric vehicles has potential to be a very good thing.
Oh no, how dare the government force their interests on the poor businesses.
Egadds! Infrastructure not used for making money?!
Yeah, we should be building all the solar panels and wind turbines we can build, whether it makes sense economically or not. As long as you can put them somewhere to generate clean energy instead of fossil it's a positive for humanity.
Yeah. Solar panels just fall out of the sky with no assosiated ecological drawbacks.
Compared to burning fossil fuel, it's almost negligible, and entirely localised to where the mining happens.
So its alright as long as you aren't directly affected. Lets push it all onto desperate economies to mine the earth and bear the brunt of pollution while I enjoy the clean air and pristine water bodies.
We can either keep pumping oil and burning it, or we can mine some stuff to build panels that last 10+ years and can be recycled at the end of their lifetimes. It's not like fossil fuel extraction is a clean process (both in ecological and humanitarian aspects), in addition to cooking the planet.
This is just a silly argument. We're already polluting those countries anyway with the current fossil fuel regime. We're already putting massive quarries for the minerals currently needed for energy generation and transmission there (coal, copper, gold, etc). We're already prospecting those countries for oil and gas. We're already chopping down rainforests to get to all these resources, not to mention to clear land for cattle grazing for the titanic meat industry.
Mining has to be done somewhere to create a decent standard of living (though Western lifestyles require exponentially more resources than those elsewhere so we can make improvements on the demand side of things). What isn't set in stone in that the extraction of resources has to be exploitative for the people living in those countries, nor that it has to be excessively environmentally damaging. Which it currently, absolutely is, because the capitalist profit motive dictates it to be so.