“Change requires democracy and a mature legal system. It requires public participation and transparency in public affairs.”

Is there a democracy anywhere in the world, in a country with development and population growth pressure, which has struck the right balance between environment and economy and achieved sustainability… or which looks even remotely like achieving this?

Democracy immediately becomes critically compromised when there is big money and power to be won.

Even if you could implement true democracy and real public participation and supervision of government, you would still have the issue of whether the public would be able to see long-term environmental issues as being more important than short-term wealth generation.

I’d be inclined to think that a communist regime would have a better chance of properly addressing environmental and sustainability issues.

I don’t see how a democratic regime could possibly get away from the notion of continuous growth (expansion of industry, economy, energy consumption, etc), no matter what green initiatives it might be able to introduce. And I can’t see that ANY green initiatives would be much more than window dressing for as long as this growth paradigm remained in place.

Pan Yue, I am pleased to see that someone from within is very concerned about sustainability in China. You have expressed many grave concerns and lots of good ideas. But I worry that it you haven’t grasped the most important point; the sheer magnitude of expansionism in China, which is set to overwhelm any green initiatives, at least for many years to come.

It is this very scale of human endeavour that needs to be tackled. Rather than striving for a “sustainable model of growth”, we need to be questioning the very merits of growth itself, of the sort that China is achieving, and start concentrating on quality of life instead.

since the selfstyled 'democracies' of the west are unable to achieve steady-state equilibrium, we can rule out those models.

autocracies have been given endless trials, with no visible improvement on the oligarchies that are the common pattern of human society. actual democracy might work: california has the most active electorate in the usa, and is leading a green policy in the face of federal resistance.

but by the time most of humanity learn to emulate california, it's very likely most of human society will have collapsed into overcrowded, underfed, uneducated favelas.

china is the leading edge of human society: what happens when population is unchecked and resources are squandered in the pursuit of private wealth. pollution diseases are going to wrack that land, riots and rebellions are inevitable when existence is threatened, and we can watch it like a preview of a dystopic science fiction movie titled:

"the decline and fall of civilization".

there'll be survivors, probably, and maybe new technology will save us from the worst scenarios, or lay in a stock of your favorite beer and stay drunk.

If you want to read a horror story of epic proportions about the internal state of China and how it conducts its business on the world stage at large (and the consequences for the rest of the world) I would suggest a book titled THE COMING CHINA WARS by Peter Navarro.
Information available via http://www.peternavarro.com

China's issues are the same as the rest of the world. Most people want to be materially wealthier and to reduce the risk associated with being alive. We all instinctively believe that the gaining of wealth, possessions and power will reduce our risk and make life more pleasant and interesting. This belief is true but we have the unfortunate paradox that many individual actions that to the individual are optimal are not optimal to the individual when everyone else tries to do the same thing.

Solutions that are adopted by all countries where we have this conflict between the common good and individual advantage are first to regulate for the common good and second to create markets through the invention of property rights that attempt to control the problem being addressed. With greenhouse gases we try to regulate the way we produce energy and we invent emissions property rights, set a cap on these rights and use markets to attempt to help foster clean energy. Neither regulation or property rights appear to work well enough to solve the problems.

There is a third way that Rewards people for consuming less and that builds markets for technologies that address the problems being addressed.

We are hoping to introduce Water Rewards over the next few months into the ACT. We will Reward people who consume less water and we will create a market in technologies that help save and supply more water. Within five years the ACT should be free of water restrictions.

We can do the same with Energy Rewards. Energy Rewards address the problem of greenhouse gases by Rewarding people who consume less polluting energy and it creates a market for technologies that produce Energy without greenhouse emissions. It can allow any country to become a zero emission country for a relatively low cost. It is estimated that Australia could be a net zero emission economy within 20 years for a 10% increase in retail Energy Prices of polluting energy sources.

China could do the same for both water and energy.