It may have recently officially overtaken the United States as the world’s leading emitter of greenhouse gasses, but China also leads the world in another environmental category: Installed Renewable Energy Capacity. A new report from The Climate Group rounds up the steps China is taking to wean itself off the polluting energy forms which are behind both its greenhouse gas emissions and its air pollution problems.

Here are some of the highlights:

Installed Renewable Energy Capacity
China currently leads the world in installed generating capacity with the largest hydro-electric capacity and fifth largest wind capacity. Currently it generates about 7.5% of its electricity renewably and plans to double this by 2020. For point of comparison, if you include hydro power in the equation, this percentage is roughly similar to US renewable energy stats. And I guess we won’t get into messy discussion of whether Three Gorges-style projects are really environmentally friendly.
www.treehugger.com/files/2008/08/china-renewable-energy-push-highlighted-the-climate-group-report.php