"Eco-friendly development and dissemination of renewable energy sources and new materials will influence the way we live and will lead the course of industrial development in the future," said China's Premier Wen Jiabao to the closing Expo Summit contingent of domestic and foreign dignitaries (eight heads of state), Nobel Prize winners and business leaders.
The World Expo, the world's largest in history with 73 million attending, for the first time in 159 years focused on cities, sustainable ones that is. China's plans for 350-600 million more urban residents by 2050 threatens to tip the earth's scales in terms of climate change and the economy so much that China is now focused on a fifth global industrial wave: the low-carbon or green economy.
"The low-carbon economy is a new industrial revolution," said Sir Nicholas Stern, Chairman of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics. "Low-carbon growth is cleaner, safer, far more attractive while high-carbon growth will kill itself. China is well placed for this industrial revolution."
Stern, author of the groundbreaking 2006 "Stern Review: the Economics of Climate Change", was referring to China's new national pilot program announced this summer by its all-powerful National Development Reform Commission for five low-carbon provinces and eight low-carbon cities.
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| Shanghai, China, photo by Bert van Dijk |
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