On the north bank of the Yangtze River near Nanjing, countless smokestacks emerge from the vast industrial sprawl and fade into thick smog. Inside the compound of Nanjing Iron & Steel, a six-story-high, geodesic dome houses the plant’s nerve center. Standing before a 30-foot-wide control board, the company’s energy director, Sun Wen Ji, oversees a dozen technicians who continually tweak the operation of the plant’s vast system of ovens, boilers, pressurizers, and pumps in an effort to maximize efficiency and minimize total energy use. The control center was purchased in 2002 from Siemens, the German multinational, at a cost of $5 million, half of which was paid by the government of Jiangsu province. “This is the most modern steel energy system in China,” claims Sun, and indeed, officials in Beijing, Nanjing, and elsewhere point to Nanjing Iron & Steel, a mid-sized steel producer, as a model of energy efficiency.

Official rhetoric aside, the company is both cause for hope and a source of despair—one of China’s best examples of energy reform in action, but also an illustration of why the country’s soaring greenhouse gas emissions show no signs of slowing. Shortly after boasting about his company’s cutting-edge technology, Sun admits that, despite orders from the Beijing central government to further reduce emissions, the plant’s top management had balked at investing the $14 million needed to achieve an additional 10 percent reduction in energy consumption. Meanwhile, he notes, the company is investing hundreds of millions of dollars annually to increase steel production. In 2007 alone, Nanjing Iron & Steel’s output rose by 21.5 percent, to 6 million tons. “They say it’s not economical to invest more in energy efficiency,” Sun says, smiling apologetically. “I hope that this will change.”

All around China, the situation is the same—energy use is skyrocketing, particularly by heavy industry, which accounts for more than 30 percent of China’s total emissions. According to studies released last year by the U.S. Energy Information Administration and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, China has not only overtaken the United States to become the world’s largest source of greenhouse gases, but its emissions have been growing at a rate that far surpasses the efforts of all wealthy nations to decrease theirs. The central government in Beijing has tried to slow the trend, with limited success in the past year. Even if the government were to achieve its own conservation targets, the country’s red-hot industrial boom would push greenhouse gas emissions upward by about 2.3 billion metric tons over the next five years. By comparison, the Kyoto Protocol requires wealthy nations to reduce their emissions by a collective 1.1 billion tons during that period. (That includes the United States, which withdrew from the treaty under President Bush and is therefore not bound by the commitment.)

Nearly all projections regarding the so-called tipping point—the threshold at which climate change becomes unstoppable—have relied upon extremely optimistic projections regarding the trajectory of Chinese emissions. For example, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the U.N. body that shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore, assumes that Chinese emissions will grow by only 3 percent annually, an unexplained reduction from the 5.7 percent average growth from 1986 to 2006, and an even sharper drop from the 10.1 average increase from 2001 to 2006.

Obviously, if the world is to cut its emissions in half by 2050, as many scientists say is necessary to avoid catastrophic warming, the problem of China’s runaway emissions must be solved. Attitudes differ on how to confront the issue. Some governments say more pressure needs to be put on Beijing to take substantial action, while others insist China simply needs foreign development assistance and subsidized access to energy-saving technologies that are being developed in the West. For its part, the Chinese government, in its role as the leader of the world’s developing nations, wants multi-billion-dollar grants and the relaxation of foreign patent protections, while insisting that the blame for global warming is the West’s alone. For both the Chinese leadership and the Bush administration, the standoff has been convenient, a circular passing of blame that leads to nowhere. Yet there is no guarantee that when the finger—pointing ends, progress on reducing emissions will begin. In the end, the scariest aspect of China’s economic boom may be that no one—not even the Communist leadership in Beijing—is in control and no one has enough power to make it go green.

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