China becomes world leader!

A couple of months ago, the report came out saying that China has overtaken the United States as the world's biggest polluter. It is producing the most CO2, the main greenhouse gas and this is probably bound to increase. On the other hand, China could soon become first in using the renewable energy! How is that possible?
China mostly relies on coal for its energy: 75% of it. With the fastly growing economy and the need for coal becoming greater and greater, China's production of CO2 is bound to rise even in the future. Compared to USA which last year produced 5800m tonnes of CO2, China produced 6,200m tonnes. This was not expected to happen so soon.
But on the other hand, Chinese government is really doing much to pollute less. Actually, it is trying to make China a world leading nation in using a renewable energy.
They are closing old and environmentally harmful coal-fired power plants and replacing them with new and more efficient coal generators. While China can not escape relying on coal to fuel its rapid economic growth, the government seems to understand that they need to invest in clean energy.
If it will go as planned, China will reduce the amount of energy used to produce a unit of economic output by 20% over two years. The government has also told the 1,000 largest energy-consuming companies to cut their power consumption even more than that, according to a recent report. In 2006, approx. 16 % of China's electricity aready came from renewable sources. The goal is to increase the proportion of renewable electricity to 23 % by 2020.
The estimates show that, while China invested over $12 billion in renewable energy in 2007, (second only to Germany), it needs to invest $398 billion all together to reach its 2020 renewable energy goals, which means $33 billion a year on average.Wow! It seems that China can not avoid the No. 1 place in the World, be it for good or for ill, in many things. It is simply huge. Olympics are over, but the race to become the most Eco friendly Country doesn't have just moral motivations. The economic growth of the future will be tightly connected with renewable energy and energy efficiency.