When China understands the logic of renewable energy

One of the things everybody in the West knows about China is that it is not a democracy, and is instead a regime run with an iron fist by a single entity, the Chinese Communist Party, whose leadership rarely acts transparently, running the country without the need for primary elections, alternative candidacies, etc.

In general, those of us who live in democracies, with relatively transparent electoral processes, tend to consider the Chinese system undesirable, little more than a dictatorship where people have no say in who governs them.

That said, among the “advantages” of the Chinese system is that because the leadership never has to put its legitimacy to the vote, it can carry out very long-term planning in the knowledge that another administration isn’t going to come along and change those plans.

Obviously, I put “advantages” in quotation marks because, as democrats, most of my readers would never be willing to sacrifice their freedom for greater planning, but there is no doubt that China, since its system works like this and its population seems to have accepted it for generations, intends to turn this into a comparative advantage, the term used in business when analyzing companies.

It turns out that China’s capacity for long-term planning is achieving something unheard of…