While America’s change of tack was widely expected following Barack Obama’s rise to the presidency, China’s unilateral action was less predictable if equally welcome. Beijing’s promise to cut energy intensity – the amount of energy used to produce each unit of gross domestic product – by 45% and double the proportion of renewables in its energy portfolio to 15% by 2020, showed that it at last recognises that the world’s interests are also its own. 

The Copenhagen conference was by far the biggest and most significant meeting in the 40 years in which the planet’s environmental future and our role in its fate have come under scrutiny. If the mass of data about rising tides and weeping glaciers were not enough, a further indication of the meeting’s profound significance could be found in the presence of global business concerns. Indisputable evidence that saving the planet has moved from the squats and teepees of eco-warriors into the offices of businessmen and technocrats. 

With ample hard cash, political muscle and commercial zeal China Inc, or the People’s Republic of China as it is sometimes known, is ideally placed to make itself the planet’s one-stop location for renewable energy infrastructure. The world’s need for a new energy framework coincides with China’s transformation of its economy from industrialisation and export to services and domestic consumption. As Lord Stern, the writer of by far the most influential climate change report, remarked: “The objective of a low-carbon economy fits well with the other objectives China has set for its economy.” 

On the face of it the planet’s biggest polluter, which builds an average of two coal-powered power plants each fortnight, is an unlikely pioneer of sustainable energy sources. It was using coal long before Marco Polo, the 13th-century explorer, reported back to an incredulous Europe that Chinese peasants burned a “black rock” for heat. 

Over the past few years, however, it has used its manufacturing prowess to begin nurturing what will become a vast domestic alternative energy industry on the back of a $15.6 billion investment in renewables in 2008 and is reportedly planning to dedicate a further $600 billion on alternative energy development in the next decade. 

To put it another way, that’s more than six times America’s green stimulus spending as a percentage of their overall economies. China Greentech Initiative, a coalition of Chinese and foreign businesses and non-governmental organisations, estimates that within three years, environmental technologies including renewable energy will become a $1 trillion market in China. 

Its growing green credentials are evident across all walks of life. With more than 400 solar-panel companies it is already the world’s biggest manufacturer of photovoltaic cells. It is also the biggest manufacturer and user of solar water heaters. To the chagrin of the US, China has created a robust automotive industry based on hybrid-electric and electric vehicles, as well as accounting for 80% of global electric bicycle sales. It also has the world’s second-largest electric railway network of 26,000km, which carries 50% of all passenger and cargo traffic. 

Every year for the past five years, China has doubled its installed wind power capacity and is aiming to generate 100 gigawatts of electricity from wind turbines by 2020. A survey in the journal Science  concluded that, if garnered, China has sufficient strong winds to supply the country’s electrical demand until 2030. 

Crucially, thanks to its authoritarian control of public dissent, Beijing is free from the kind of “nimby” local opposition that impedes the development of wind farm and hydropower projects in the US and Europe. As in so many other areas of development economics, China acts while others dither. 

Even its continued investment in coal is not as black as it seems. China is in the process of replacing thousands of small, inefficient coal-burning power plants with larger, more efficient ones. Between 2006 and 2008 it closed 34 gigawatts-worth of small plants and opened the likes of the 1GW coal plant in Yuhuan, which can generate a kilowatt hour of electricity with 283 grams of coal; in 2005 it took 370 grams. 

It has also begun trials on carbon capture and storage (CCS) techniques, which many believe could become a viable way to “clean” coal. CCS works by removing pollutants from coal either before or during combustion and storing them underground, most commonly in depleted oil fields. A similar technique is used by oil companies to extract difficult-to-reach oil pockets in existing fields. 

A pilot CCS project in Beijing supplies 10% of the city’s electricity and captures 3,000 tons of CO2 a year. Although the technology is 20 years away from being commercially viable, its eventual adoption would open guilt-free use to the energy resource that will remain the backbone of China’s economy for the next several decades.  

China’s transformation of its energy model should put the nation within reach of becoming something new – the world’s first sustainable superpower.