China's Energy-Environmental Dilemma: Strategies and Framework Conditions

Summary Jorund Buen, ‘China's Energy-Environmental Dilemma: Strategies and Framework Conditions’, Forum for Development Studies, 1998:1, pp. 163–203. Environmental energy technologies that may potentially limit national and international environmental problems, associated with China's coal-based energy system, are already on the verge of commercialisation. Pursuing a combined strategy of energy conservation and the introduction of new and renewable energy resources would be an important step towards solving China's dilemma of balancing energy-dependent economic growth and environmental protection. However, China needs to make major political, legal and institutional changes before the potential of these technologies can be realised. The stimulus for such a development may come from forces outside, rather than within, the state bureaucracy.