A common conservative reaction to climate change issues has been "Oh, yeah, well what about China!", and sometimes you even see pundits hinting that us enlightened Westerners need to put some pressure on China to get them to clean up their act, but that strikes me as ridiculous: they know they've got an environmental problem and they're certainly intelligent and capable enough to solve it. (And have you looked at us enlightened Westerners recently?).
It seems to me like the near future can be taken as a cognitive competition, a test between governing systems: Which of us will respond first to the threat posed by global warming?
