A quite interesting Op-Ed from Thomas Friedman a couple weeks ago that I missed makes the point that China is starting to shift their economy hard in the direction of green endeavors.

Well, folks. Sputnik just went up again: China’s going clean-tech. The
view of China in the U.S. Congress — that China is going to try to
leapfrog us by out-polluting us — is out of date. It’s going to try to
out-green us. Right now, China is focused on low-cost manufacturing of
solar, wind and batteries and building the world’s biggest market for
these products. It still badly lags U.S. innovation. But research will
follow the market. America’s premier solar equipment maker, Applied
Materials, is about to open the world’s largest privately funded solar
research facility — in Xian, China.

I suspect that the effort to clean up Beijing for the 2008 games is part of what spurred this notion there.  They had to basically shut down the city for months to get the air quality to levels that the long distance runners would compete.  That probably brought some of the environmentalists to the forefront of the party.

On an unrelated front, I thought nytimes was going to get rid of their stupid sign in form.  Get with the 21st century nytimes.