Syndicate content   Daniel Kammen's picture         If necessity
is the mother of invention, cooperation may be the missing
father. The rapid pace of China’s production and sales of clean
energy technology is the result of necessity. China is the
world’s largest energy consumer, and while its coal resources
are vast—70% of China’s energy and 80% of its electricity come
from coal—no other nation pays as high an environmental cost for
energy. China has no other path to continued growth and energy
security for its 1.3 billion people than through renewable
energy and energy efficiency. To meet the rising demand, China
invested over $50 billion in clean energy in 2010 alone. To put
this in perspective, the Chinese invested twice as much in clean
energy as did the US.   The US, too, is dependent on coal for
49% of electricity in 2010. Energy is the largest component of
the US annual imports, with crude oil only accounts for 38.4% of
the US trade deficit in 2009. Both nations made clean energy
investment central to