Lea Lai's action
As Barack Obama, the new President of United States, said, “As we develop new forms of clean energy here at home, we will share our technology and our innovations with all the nations of the world. If we can build a clean coal plant in America, China should be able to as well[1]." He pointed out a real leadership for clean energy future is international cooperation, especially to cooperate with China. In this case, I suggest one of “the 100 Days of Action” could be: to write an article for chinadialogue to provide guidance and suggestions for China to shift to a clean energy future. For more details, http://www.chinadialogue.net/.
The main goal of the National Teach-In is to get everyone involved to make clean energy solutions for global warming. To build a grassroots movement, we need to draw a large number of people’s concern on environmental problems; to solve the global warming, we need to focus on the international cooperation on climate change. And China is a perfect match target, since it not only has the largest population in the world but also has a great potential to replace United States to become the world’s largest greenhouse gases emitter as early as 2009.[2] Therefore, helping China to drive towards a clean-energy future could help National Tech-in to achieve the goal.
Addressing Chinese environmental problems should start with communication. First, it is very important to improve Chinese citizens’ consciousness of using environmental friendly products. It is not easy for western countries to spread theses environmental information to Chinese people, since most of Chinese don’t know English very well. If we only write the articles in English and publish them on English website, it won’t help Chinese citizens to get involved in the climate movement Therefore, I think if we publish the articles on chinadialogue, which is a popular website in China with both English and Chinese discussions on environmental issues, could be a good choice to let Chinese people access our information.
Once we have a proper media to contact with Chinese people, we can focus on advocating them to adopt an environment-friendly life style. The main idea of environment-friendly life style is green consumption. Green consumption is relative to the 5R’s concept: reduce, re-evaluate, reuse, recycle and rescues. It encourages people to reduce domestic pollution, to purchase green products, to use energy efficiently, to recycle the waste and to preserve the species. This might be simply but easy for people to understand and to take an action. Chinese population is about 1.3billion, that means even we only can spread our idea of environmental-friendly life style to 1% of them, it could change 1.3 billion people’s consumption. Individuals’ spending habit would have a huge impact to the market, even strong enough to restructure the whole domestic economy.
