Tomorrow morning, a conference begins here in Shanghai run by the U.S. Trade and Development Agency (USTDA) intended to introduce the leaders of the Chinese energy sector to the potential use of IGCC as a "clean coal" technology. IGCC, or Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle, is an advanced technology for using coal or other long hydrocarbons to create syngas (and concentrated waste effluent), which can be then combusted cleanly and efficiently in a gas turbine to generate electricity, with the waste heat being used to generate electricity from a steam turbine. Although this is still a coal technology and thus has serious environmental challenges, it uses 33 percent less NOx, 75 percent less SOx, etc. than conventional coal technologies.

In conversations with Chinese about "the environment," I've often heard this black & white ideology: it's a choice between destroy the environment in order to live a modern lifestyle, or save the environment but thus need to go back to living in caves. It's been a frustration that this extremely simplistic philosophy (which is by no means limited to China) is also represented by the economic model that China has followed to keep up its explosive growth in GDP.

In the past two weeks in Beijing I've seen my first intense rains in this drought-afflicted and dusty city. The lightning and heavy winds simply crash down out of nowhere upon a still mostly pedestrian city, driving taxi availability into the ground and soaking everyone else. I was pretty surprised by the rapid changes in weather…but my local colleagues were not: China, in fact, has the largest cloud-seeding system in the world.

In my last post, I marveled at the plethora of clean energy technologies that were available at an environmental protection conference here in Beijing – presumably without subsidy. In fact, the PRC has indeed taken a no-subsidies stance, at least according to a speech by central bank Governor Zhou Xiaochuan last year where he called for removing price-distorting subsidies on energy and raw materials.

Over this past weekend I had the pleasure of representing GE at the 2007 China Beijing International Energy Saving and Environmental Protection Exhibition. Boy oh boy, what a circus! Attendees included celebrities from the International Olympic Committee, at least 100 photographers, ultra-modern (maybe even post-modern) display booths from major corporations, and of course the necessary exhibition "free sample infomercials.”

The big news in Beijing this past week was that the PRC's National Development and Reform Commission released their first climate change commitment plan. Just 10 days ago, President Bush also made his first proposal for addressing greenhouse gas emissions: that by the end of his term, the U.S. and other nations would "set a long-term global goal for reducing greenhouse gases."

I've been living in an all-Chinese apartment complex in a very non-touristy neighborhood of Beijing for a week now (I have yet to see a foreigner within a 4-kilometer radius). My most significant observation to date has been that for a city with among the most significant environmental issues in the world, Beijing's inhabitants are extremely efficient in their individual resource use.

The transformation in my immediate surroundings over the past week has been simply unbelievable. No matter what I had been told by both Chinese and American Cornellians, none of it succeeded in preparing me for the conditions of Beijing's environment. One week ago I was in Ithaca, NY and the sunny Western world, surrounded by recycling bins, fresh air, and swimmable gorges. Since my plane landed, however, I literally haven't seen the sun once – except for just a few seconds on Saturday when a faint outline was barely visible through the thick haze. Welcome to Beijing, the most polluted city on Earth, with an atmosphere that is responsible for 400,000 premature deaths a year.

Despite this situation, there are many promising things happening to the environment in this country, and I'll discuss those as well over the course of blogging this summer, but the short story is that arriving in Beijing was like being Keanu Reeves in the scene of The Matrix when Morpheus first takes Neo to see what the real world looks like. And I have only begun to tumble down the rabbit hole.