Environment & Climate Change

The development and deployment of cleaner energy technologies have become globalized phenomena. Yet despite the fact that energy-related goods account for more than ten percent of international trade, policy makers, academics, and the business community perceive barriers to the global diffusion of these emerging technologies. Experts point to problems including intellectual property concerns, trade barriers, and developing countries' limited access to technology and funding. In this book, Kelly Gallagher uses analysis and case studies from China's solar photovoltaic, gas turbine, advanced battery, and coal gasification industries to examine both barriers and incentives in clean energy technology transfer.

Energy policy is on everyone's mind these days. The U.S. presidential campaign focused on energy independence and exploration ("Drill, baby, drill!"), climate change, alternative fuels, even nuclear energy. But there is a serious problem endemic to America's energy challenges. Policymakers tend to do just enough to satisfy political demands but not enough to solve the real problems, and they wait too long to act. The resulting policies are overly reactive, enacted once damage is already done, and they are too often incomplete, incoherent, and ineffectual. Given the gravity of current economic, geopolitical, and environmental concerns, this is more unacceptable than ever. This important volume details this problem, making clear the unfortunate results of such short-sighted thinking, and it proposes measures to overcome this counterproductive tendency.

Over several years, some of the most distinguished Chinese and American scholars have engaged in a major research project, sponsored by the China- U.S. Exchange Foundation (USEF), to address the big bilateral and global issues the two countries face. Historically, the ascension of a great power has resulted in armed conflict. This group of scholars—experts in politics, economics, international security, and environmental studies—set out to establish consensus on potentially contentious issues and elaborate areas where the two nations can work together to achieve common goals. Featuring essays on global warming, trade relations, Taiwan, democratization, WMDs and bilateral humanitarian intervention, Power and Restraint finds that China and the United States can exist side by side and establish mutual understanding to better cope with the common challenges they face.

"In the twenty-first century, the United States and China are destined to be the largest and strongest powers in the international system. China's rise has been proclaimed to be "peaceful," but in a prior century the American rise was scarcely pacific. The United States threatened war with Canada and Britain and actuallt fought against Mexico, annexing nearly half of that country in 1848. China was also vigilant and quick to react in its neighborhood. as U.S. forces neared the Yalu River in October 1950, China intervened in the Korean War, even though the United States possessed nuclear weapons and beijing did not. Neither state has been relaxed in the presence of challenging neighbors."

This is the first handbook to provide a global policy perspective on energy, bringing together a diverse range of international energy issues in one volume.

In China Shifts Gears, Kelly Sims Gallagher identifies an unprecedented opportunity for China to "shift gears" and avoid the usual problems associated with the automobile industry while spurring economic development.

"The most important book by any ex-Clinton official."



-Thomas L. Friedman, The New York Times (April 16, 1999)