China is much stronger on climate action than western media asserts
From renewables to reforestation to electrification China is outstripping the world
A friend and on-and-off collaborator on IPOs and technical innovation initiatives returned recently from a month in Beijing, where he was applying machine learning against video to speed training in sports. He’s a walker, so he covered up to 20 kilometers a day on the streets of the city. He made two observations that rung true for me, as someone who has been paying attention to China, but from afar.
The first is that the air was clean and the sky was blue. While my friend was there during the cleaner air summer rather than the winter when the air quality is typically at its worst, the improvement in air quality in Chinese cities has been extraordinary over the past decade.
The second was that the streets were incredibly quiet, much quieter than the streets of Vancouver outside the coffee shop we were in as he told me about his trip. It wasn’t that the streets were empty. Quite the opposite. They were packed with cars and people. But virtually all the vehicles were electric. No engine noise. No diesel trucks rumbling past. No motorcycles revving. Just tire noise, which at the lower speeds typical to city streets is very quiet.
