CHINA

JAMES PURTILL—China is installing record amounts of solar and wind, while scaling back once-ambitious plans for nuclear. While Australia is falling behind its renewables installation targets, China may meet its end-of-2030 target by the end of this month, according to a report.

What’s next?

Energy experts are looking to China, the world’s largest emitter and once a climate villain, for lessons on how to rapidly decarbonise. While Australia debates the merits of going nuclear and frustration grows over the slower-than-needed rollout of solar and wind power, China is going all in on renewables. New figures show the pace of its clean energy transition is roughly the equivalent of installing five large-scale nuclear power plants worth of renewables every week.

BEN NORTON—Political economists Radhika Desai and Michael Hudson are joined by Beijing-based scholar Mick Dunford to discuss China’s economy and debunk Western media myths, addressing accusations that consumption is too low, fears of “Japanification”, the role of exports, and the new Chinese growth strategy.

ERIC ZUESSE—READ THE STUNNING DISARMAMENT PROPOSAL THE SOVIETS TENDERED AT THE END OF WW2
Who benefited from America’s refusal even to discuss what had been U.S. President FDR’s aim for the post-WW-II world? The beneficiaries are what Eisenhower when leaving office called the “military industrial complex,” and are basically America’s hundred largest military contractors, especially the owners of the largest weapons-manufacturing firms such as Lockheed. Ike had served them well, and then three days before leaving office warned the public about them so as not to be blamed (along with Truman) by historians, for having created it.

JEFF J. BROWN—It’s too easy for people like Engdahl to think that China is just like the United States or Europe, and it’s not. The land is all people-owned. The banks are all people-owned. The insurance companies are all people-owned. Much of the large scale industry is all people-owned. So plus you have a much more honest, caring government that’s actually trying to help the people instead of trying to kill it [or bamboozle it]. It’s just also wrongheaded.

GODFREE ROBERTS—His Rural Cooperative Medical System trained Barefoot Doctors – who lived in their villages all their lives and were available day and night – to administer vaccinations, demonstrate correct handling of pesticides, introduce new sanitation methods and, by teaching nutrition and child care, cut infant and maternal mortality in half. Urban doctors, now required to tour the countryside, provided free treatment and trained promising barefoot doctors at urban hospitals. By the end of 1976, every village in China had a clinic and the death rate had fallen by 18%.