The Best American Science and Nature Writing Part 15

ON MARCH 3, 1986, four of China's top weapons scientistsa"each a veteran of the missile and s.p.a.ce programsa"sent a private letter to Deng Xiaoping, the leader of the country. Their letter was a warning: decades of relentless focus on militarization had crippled the country's civilian scientific establishment; China must join the world's xin jishu geming, the "new technological revolution," they said, or it would be left behind. They called for an lite project devoted to technology ranging from biotech to s.p.a.ce research. Deng agreed and scribbled on the letter, "Action must be taken on this now." This was China's "Sputnik moment," and the project was code-named the 863 Program, for the year and month of its birth.

In the years that followed, the government pumped billions of dollars into labs and universities and enterprises on projects ranging from cloning to underwater robots. Then, in 2001, Chinese officials abruptly expanded one program in particular: energy technology. The reasons were clear. Once the largest oil exporter in East Asia, China was now adding more than two thousand cars a day and importing millions of barrels; its energy security hinged on a flotilla of tankers stretched across distant seas. Meanwhile, China was getting nearly 80 percent of its electricity from coal, which was rendering the air in much of the country unbreathable and hastening climate changes that could undermine China's future stability. Rising sea levels were on pace to create more refugees in China than in any other country, even Bangladesh.

In 2006 Chinese leaders redoubled their commitment to new energy technology; they boosted funding for research and set targets for installing wind turbines, solar panels, hydroelectric dams, and other renewable sources of energy that were higher than goals in the United States. China doubled its wind power capacity that year, then doubled it again the next year, and the year after. The country had virtually no solar industry in 2003; five years later, it was manufacturing more solar cells than any other country, winning customers from foreign companies that had invented the technology in the first place. As President Hu Jintao, a political heir of Deng Xiaoping, put it in October 2009, China must "seize preemptive opportunities in the new round of the global energy revolution."

A China born again green can be hard to imagine, especially for people who live here. After four years in Beijing, I've learned how to gauge the pollution before I open the curtains; by dawn on the smoggiest days, the lungs ache. The city government does not dwell on the details; its daily air-quality measurement does not even tally the tiniest particles of pollution, which are the most damaging to the respiratory system. Last year the U.S. Emba.s.sy installed an air monitor on the roof of one of its buildings, and every hour it posts the results to a Twitter feed, with a score ranging from 1, which is the cleanest air, to 500, the dirtiest. American cities consider anything above 100 to be unhealthy. The rare times in which an American city has scored above 300 have been in the midst of forest fires. In these cases, the government puts out public health notices warning that the air is "hazardous" and that "everyone should avoid all physical activity outdoors." As I type this in Beijing, the emba.s.sy's air monitor says that today's score is 500.

China is so biga"and is growing so fasta"that in 2006 it pa.s.sed the United States to become the world's largest producer of greenhouse gases. If China's emissions keep climbing as they have for the past thirty years, the country will emit more of those gases in the next thirty years than the United States has in its entire history. So the question is no longer whether China is equipped to play a role in combating climate change but how that role will affect other countries. David Sandalow, the U.S. a.s.sistant secretary of energy for policy and international affairs, has been to China five times in five months. He told me, "China's investment in clean en ergy is extraordinary." For America, he added, the implication is clear: "Unless the U.S. makes investments, we are not compet.i.tive in the clean-tech sector in the years and decades to come."

One of the firms that are part of the 863 Program is Goldwind Science and Technology Company. It operates a plant and a laboratory in a cl.u.s.ter of high-tech companies in an outlying district of Beijing called Yizhuang, which has been trying to rebrand itself with the name E-Town. (China has been establis.h.i.+ng high-tech cl.u.s.ters since the late 1980s, after scientists returned from abroad with news of Silicon Valley and Route 128.) Yizhuang was a royal hunting ground under the last emperor, but as E-Town it has the sweeping asphalt vistas of a suburban office park, around blocks of reflective-gla.s.s buildings occupied by Nokia, Bosch, and other corporations. Local planning officials have embraced the vocabulary of a new era; E -Town, they say, will be a model not only of e-business but also of e-government, e-community, e-knowledge, and e-parks.

When I reached Goldwind, the first thing I saw was a spirited soccer game underway on a field in the center of the campus. An arti ficial rock-climbing wall covered one side of the gla.s.s-and-steel research center. I met the chairman, Wu Gang, in his office on the third floor, and I asked about the sports. "We employ several coaches and music teachers," he said. "They do training for our staff." A pair of pushup bars rested on the carpet beside his desk. At fifty-one years old, Wu is tall, with wire-rim gla.s.ses, rumpled black hair, and the broad shoulders of a swimmer. ("I can do the b.u.t.terfly," he said.) For fun he sings Peking opera. Wu said that he had not been a robust child: "My education was very serious. Just learning, learning, learning. I wanted to jump out of that!"

Wu integrates his hobbies into his work life in the manner of a California entrepreneur. He once led seventeen people, including seven Goldwind employees, on a mountaineering expedition across Mt. Bogda, in the Tian Shan range, in western China. "We Chinese are very weak in this fielda"teamwork," Wu said. He recently put his workers on a five-year self-improvement regimen; among the corporate announcements on Goldwind's website, the company now posts its inhouse sports reports. ("All the vigorous and valiant players shot and dunked frequently," according to a recent basketball report on a game between factory workers.) Wu was born and raised in the far western region of Xinjiang, home to vast plains and peaks that create natural wind tunnels, with gusts so ferocious that they can sweep trains from their tracks. In the 1980s, engineers from Europe began arriving in Xinjiang in order to test their wind turbines, and in 1987 Wu, then a young engineer in charge of an early Chinese wind farm, worked alongside engineers from Denmark, a center of wind power research. He immersed himself in the mechanics of turbinesa""Where are their stomachs, and where are their hearts?" he said. In 1997 state science officials offered him the project of building a 600-kilowatt turbine, small by international standards but still unknown territory in China. Many recipients of government research funding simply used the money to conduct their experiments and move on, but some, like Wu, saw the cash as the kernel of a business. He figured that every dollar from the government could attract more than ten dollars in bank loans: "We can show them, 'This is money we got from the science ministry.'"

Wu saw little reason to start from zero: Goldwind licensed a design from Jacobs Energie, a German company. Manufacturing was not as simple. Early attempts were a "terrible failure," Wu said. "Whole blades dropped off." He shook his head. "The main shafts broke. It was really very dangerous."

Goldwind shut down for three months. The company eventually solved the problems, and, with the help of 863 and other government funding, it expanded into a full range of large and sophisticated turbines. Many of them were licensed from abroad, but as they were built in China, they sold for a third less than European and American rivals. Goldwind's sales doubled every year from 2000 to 2008. In 2007 Wu took the company public, and garnered nearly $200 million.

China has made up so much ground on clean tech in part through protectionisma"until recently, wind farms were required to use turbines with locally manufactured parts. The requirement went into effect in 2003; by the time it was lifted, six years later, Chinese turbines dominated the local market. In fact, the policy worked too well: China's wind farms have grown so fast that according to estimates, between 20 and 30 percent aren't actually generating electricity. A surplus of factories was only part of the problem: local bureaucrats, it turned out, were being rewarded not for how much electricity they generated but for how much equip ment they installeda"a blunder that is often cited by skeptics of China's efforts.

They have a point; many factories are churning out cheap, unreliable turbines because the government lacks sufficient technical standards. But the grid problem is probably temporary. China is already buying and installing the world's most efficient transmission linesa""an area where China has actually moved ahead of the U.S.," according to Deborah Seligsohn, a senior fellow at the World Resources Inst.i.tute. In the next decade, China plans to install wind power equipment capable of generating nearly five times the power of the Three Gorges Dam, the world's largest producer.

After I met with Wu Gang, the company's director of strategy and global development, Zhou Tong, an elegant woman in her thirties, handed me a hard hat and walked me next door to the turbine-a.s.sembly plant, an immaculate four-story hangar filled with workers in orange jumpsuits piecing together turbine parts that were as big and s.p.a.cy-looking as Airstream trailers. The turbines were astonis.h.i.+ng pieces of equipmenta"so large that some manufacturers put helicopter pads on topa"and the technical complexity dispelled any lingering image I had of Chinese factories as rows of unskilled workers stooped over cheap electronics. Wandering among the turbines, we pa.s.sed some Ping-Pong tables, where a compet.i.tion was underway, and stopped in front of a s.h.i.+ny white dome that looked like the nose of a pa.s.senger jet. It was a rotor huba"the point where blades intersecta"and it was part of Goldwind's newest treasure, a turbine large enough to generate 2.5 megawatts of electricity, its largest yet. "Wow, this is a 2.5!" Zhou exclaimed. "I saw the first one in Germany. This is the first one I've seen here." Wu was set to unveil the new turbine at a press conference the next day. A flatbed truck, loaded with turbine parts and idling in the doorway, was bound for wind farms throughout Manchuria.

The prospect of a future powered by the sun and the wind is so appealing that it obscures a less charming fact: coal is going nowhere soon. Even the most optimistic forecasts agree that China and the United States, for the foreseeable future, will remain ravenous consumers. (China burns more coal than America, Europe, and j.a.pan combined.) As Julio Friedmann, an energy expert at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, near San Francisco, told me, "The decisions that China and the U.S. make in the next five years in the coal sector will determine the future of this century."

In 2001 the 863 Program launched a "clean coal" project, and Yao Qiang, a professor of thermal engineering at Beijing's Tsinghua University, was appointed to the committee in charge. He said that its purpose is simple: to spur innovation of ideas so risky and expensive that no private company will attempt them alone. The government is not trying to ordain which technologies will prevail; the notion of attempting to pick "winners and losers" is as unpopular among Chinese technologists as it is in Silicon Valley. Rather, Yao sees his role as trying to insure that promising ideas have a chance to contend at all. "If the government does nothing, the technology is doomed to fail," he said.

Grants from the 863 Program flowed to places like the Thermal Power Research Inst.i.tute, based in the ancient city of Xi'an in the center of China's coal country. "The impact was huge," Xu s.h.i.+sen, the chief engineer at the inst.i.tute, told me over lunch recently. "Take our project, for example," he said, referring to an experimental power plant that, if successful, will produce very low emissions. "Without 863, the technology would have been delayed for years."

After lunch a pair of engineers took me to see their laboratory: a drab eight-story concrete building crammed with so many pipes and ducts that it felt like the engine room of a s.h.i.+p. We climbed the stairs to the fourth floor and stepped into a room with sacks of coal samples lining the walls like sandbags. In the center of the room was a device that looked like a household boiler, although it was three times the usual size, and pipes and wires bristled from the top and the sides. It was an experimental coal gasifier, which uses intense pressure and heat to turn coal dust into a gas that can be burned with less waste, rather than burning coal the old-fas.h.i.+oned way. With a coal gasifier, it is far easier to extract greenhouse emissions so that they can be stored or reused instead of floating into the atmosphere. Gasifiers have been around for decades, but they are expensivea"from $500 million to more than $2 billion for the power-plant sizea"so hardly any American utilities use them. The researchers in Xi'an, however, set out to make one better and cheaper.

One of the engineers, Xu Yue, joined the gasifier project in 1997. A team of ten worked in twelve-hour s.h.i.+fts, conducting their experiments around the clock. "There was a bed there," he said, pointing to the corner of a soot-stained control room. (The image of China as a nation of engineers toiling for pennies is overstated; Xu Yue works hard, but he earns around $100,000 a year.) Beyond salaries, everything about the lab was cheaper than it would have been in the United States, from the land on which it was built to the cost of heating the building, and when the gasifier was finished it had a price tag one-third to one-half that of the equivalent in the West.

When Albert Lin, an American energy entrepreneur on the board of Future Fuels, a Texas-based power-plant developer, set out to find a gasifier for a pioneering new plant that is designed to spew less greenhouse gas, he figured that he would buy one from GE or Sh.e.l.l. Then his engineers tested the Xi'an version. It was "the absolute best we've seen," Lin told me. (Lin said that the "secret sauce" in the Chinese design is a clever bit of engineering that recycles the heat created by the gasifier to convert yet more coal into gas.) His company licensed the Chinese design, marking one of the first instances of Chinese coal technology's coming to America. "Fifteen or twenty years ago, anyone you asked would have said that Western technologies in coal gasification were superior to anything in China," Lin said. "Now, I think, that claim is not true."

The 863 Program took much of its shape from the American research system used by the National Inst.i.tutes of Health and the Department of Defense: the government appointed panels of experts, who drew up research priorities, called for bids, and awarded contracts. In 1987 the government gave it an initial budget of around $200 million a year. That figure was small by Western standards, but the sum went far in China, according to Evan Feigenbaum, an Asia specialist at the Council on Foreign Relations, who studied the program. When I mentioned to Xu s.h.i.+sen, the coal engineer in Xi'an, that American scientists are dubious of top-down efforts to drive innovation, he suggested that the system is more compet.i.tive than outsiders imagine. "It is very intensea"like a presidential election," he joked, and he sketched out the system: "Normally, each project will have five to eight contendersa"some less, some morea"but there is a broad field of innovators. A lot of companies are doing the same thing, so everyone wants to have a breakthrough." He went on, "It's not possible to have a flawless system, but it makes relatively few mistakes. It combines the will of the state with ma.s.s innovation."

R & D expenditures have grown faster in China than in any other big countrya"climbing about 20 percent each year for two decades, to $70 billion last year. Investment in energy research under the 863 Program has grown far faster: between 1991 and 2005, the most recent year on record, the amount increased nearly fifty-fold.

In America things have gone differently. In April of 1977, President Jimmy Carter warned that the hunt for new energy sources, triggered by the second Arab oil embargo, would be the "moral equivalent of war." He nearly quadrupled public investment in energy research, and by the mid-1980s the United States was the unchallenged leader in clean technology, manufacturing more than 50 percent of the world's solar cells and installing 90 percent of the wind power.

Ronald Reagan, however, campaigned on a pledge to abolish the Department of Energy, and once in office, he reduced investment in research, beginning a slide that would continue for a quarter-century. "We were working on a whole slate of very innovative and interesting technologies," Friedmann, of the Lawrence Livermore lab, said. "And, basically, when the price of oil dropped in 1986, we rolled up the carpet and said, 'This isn't interesting anymore.'" By 2006, according to the American a.s.sociation for the Advancement of Science, the U.S. government was investing $1.4 billion a yeara"less than one-sixth the level at its peak, in 1979, with adjustments for inflation. (Federal spending on medical research, by contrast, nearly quadrupled during that time, to more than $29 billion.) Scientists were alarmed. The starkest warning came in 2005, from the National Academies, the country's top science advisory body, which released Rising Above the Gathering Storm, a landmark report on U.S. compet.i.tiveness. It urged the government to boost investment in research, especially in energy. The authorsa"among them Steven Chu, then the director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and now the secretary of energy, and Robert Gates, the former CIA director and now the secretary of defense a"wrote, "We fear the abruptness with which a lead in science and technology can be losta"and the difficulty of recovering a lead once lost, if indeed it can be regained at all."

They called for a new energy agency that could spur the hunt for "transformative" technologies. It would inject money into universities and companies and would be called the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, or ARPA-E, modeled on DARPA, the Defense Department unit that President Eisenhower founded in response to Sputnik. (DARPA went on to play a significant role in the invention of the Internet, stealth technology, and the computer mouse, among other things.) ARPA-E, they hoped, would shepherd new energy inventions from the lab to the market, bridging the funding gap that is referred to in engineering circles as the "valley of death." Congress approved the idea in 2007, but President George W. Bush criticized it as an "expansion of government" into a role that is "more appropriately left to the private sector." He never requested funding, and the idea fizzled.

Other plans withered as well. In January 2008, the Bush administration withdrew support for FutureGen, a proposed project in Illinois that would have been the world's first coal-fired, near-zero-emissions power plant. The administration cited cost overruns, saying the price had climbed to $1.8 billion, but an audit by the Government Accountability Office later discovered that Bush appointees had overstated the costs by $500 million. House Democrats launched an investigation, which concluded, "FutureGen appears to have been nothing more than a public-relations ploy for Bush Administration officials to make it appear to the public and the world that the United States was doing something to address global warming." An internal Energy Department report had warned that canceling the project would set back the advance of carbon-storage technology by "at least 10 years." An e-mail between officials emphasized that Bush's secretary of energy, Samuel Bod-man, "wants to kill" FutureGen "with or without a Plan B." (Bod-man denies that costs were overstated.) After FutureGen foundered, China broke ground on its own version: GreenGen. If it opens as planned in 2011, China will have the most high-tech low-emissions coal-fired plant in the world.

Two summers ago, a truckload of Beijing munic.i.p.al workers turned up in my neighborhood and began unspooling heavy-duty black power lines, which they attached to our houses in preparation for a campaign to replace coal-burning furnaces with electric radiators. Soon the Coal-to-Electricity Project, as it was called, opened a small radiator showroom in a storefront around the corner, on a block shared by a s.e.x shop and a vendor of funeral shrouds. My neighbors and I wandered over to choose from among the radiator options.

Two-thirds of the price was subsidized by the city, which estimates that it has replaced almost 100,000 coal stoves since the project began five years ago, cutting down on sulfur and dust emissions. I settled on a Marley CNLS340, a heater about the size of a large suitcase, manufactured in Shanghai. It had a built-in thermostat preprogrammed to use less electricity during peak day hours and then store it up at night, when demand was lowera"a principle similar to the "smart meters" that American utilities plan to install in the next decade.

Neighbors began cutting their electricity bills by climbing up to their rooftops and installing solar water heatersa"simple pieces of equipment with a water tank and a stretch of gla.s.s tubing to be heated by the sun. (China, which produces 50 percent of the world's solar heaters, now uses more of them than any other country.) And in the hardware stalls of the raucous covered market nearby, where the inventory ranges from live eels to doorbells, coiled high-efficiency light bulbs began crowding out traditional bulbs for sale. The government, it turned out, had inst.i.tuted a 30-percent wholesale subsidy on efficient bulbs. Without anybody really noticing, China sold 62 million subsidized bulbs in ten months.

When Hu Jintao called on China to adopt a "scientific concept of development" in 2003, he was making a point: China's history of development at all costs had run its course. And in ways that were easy to overlook, China had embarked on deep changes.

In the summer of 2005, Edward Cunningham, a Ph.D. student researching energy policy at MIT, was traveling in the Chinese countryside when he noticed something peculiar: the government was allowing the price of coal to rise sharply after decades of controls. "I said, 'How the h.e.l.l?'" he recalled. "'That can't be right. Maybe this is just some freak anecdotal evidence.'" It was in fact a pivotal change: manipulating the price of coal had always insured that Chinese utilities would produce ever more electricity, but the unhappy side effect was that utilities needed to build nothing more efficient than the cheapest, dirtiest plants. Coal prices had begun to rise, however, and that would leave power plants no choice but to install cleaner, more efficient equipment. Cunningham, now a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard, said that the effect had broad consequences. "We are going to see a huge amount of learning that we have not seen in the U.S."

Learning, in technology terms, is another way of saying "reducing cost." The more a technology is produced, the cheaper it becomes, and that can lead to change as revolutionary as dreaming up an invention in the first place: Henry Ford invented neither the automobile nor the a.s.sembly line. He simply perfected their combination to yield the world's first affordable cars.

In the same way, technology that is too expensive to be profitable in the West can become economical once China is involved; DVD players and flat-screen televisions were luxury goods until Chinese low-cost production made them ubiquitous. So far, many of the most promising energy technologiesa"from thin-film solar cells to complex systems that store carbon in depleted oil wellsa"are luxury goods, but the combination of Chinese manufacturing and American innovation is powerful; Kevin Czinger, a former Goldman Sachs executive, called it "the Apple model." "Own the brand, the design, and the intellectual property," he said, and then go to whoever can manufacture the technology reliably and cheaply. A few years ago, Czinger began looking at the business of electric cars. Detroit was going to move slowly, he figured, to avoid undermining its main business, and U.S. startups, including Tesla and Fisker, were planning to sell luxury electric cars for more than $80,000 each. Czinger had something else in mind.

"These cars should be far simpler and far cheaper than anything that's manufactured today," he told me when we met last spring in Beijing. At fifty, Czinger has brown hair swept back, sharp cheekbones, and an intensity that borders on the unnerving. ("Kevin Czinger was the toughest kid to play football at Yale in my thirty-two years as head coach," Carm Cozza, the former Yale coach, wrote in a memoir. "He was also the most unusual personality, probably the outstanding overachiever, maybe the brightest student, and definitely the scariest individual.") In the spring of 2008, Czinger signed on as the CEO of Miles Electric Vehicles, a small electric-car company in Santa Monica that was looking to expand, and he went searching for a Chinese partner. He ended up at Tianjin Lishen Battery Joint-Stock Company. A decade ago, j.a.pan dominated the world of lithium-ion batteriesa"the powerful lightweight cells that hold promise for an electric-car futurea"but in 1998 the Chinese government launched a push to catch up. Lishen received millions in subsidies and hundreds of acres of low-cost land to build a factory. The company grew to $250 million in annual sales, with customers including Apple, Samsung, and Motorola. Last year the 863 Program gave Lishen a $2.6-million grant to get into the electric-car business. That is when Czinger showed up. "We hit it off immediately," Qin Xingcai, the general manager of Lishen, said.

Czinger, who by now was heading up a sister company called Coda Automotive, added components from America and Germany and a cha.s.sis licensed from j.a.pan. If all goes as planned, the Coda will become the first ma.s.s-produced all-electric sedan for sale in the United States next fall, with a price tag, after government rebates, of about $32,000. The Coda looks normal to the point of ba.n.a.l, a Toyotaish family car indistinguishable from anything you would find in a suburban cul-de-sac. And that's the point; its tagline, "A model for the mainstream," is a jab at more eccentric and expensive alternatives.

The race to make the first successful electric car may hinge on what engineers call "the pack"a"the intricate bundle of batteries that is the most temperamental equipment on board. If the pack is too big, the car will be too pricey; if the pack is too small or of poor design, it will drive like a golf cart. "Batteries are a lot like people," Phil Gow, Coda's chief battery engineer, told me when I visited the Tianjin factory, a ninety-minute drive from Beijing. "They want to have a certain temperature range. They're finicky." To explain, Gow, a Canadian, who is bald and has a goatee, led me to one of Lishen's production lines, similar to the car-battery line that will be fully operational next year. Workers in blue uniforms and blue hairnets were moving in swift precision around long temperature-controlled a.s.sembly lines, sealed off from dust and contamination by gla.s.s walls.

The workers were making laptop batteriesa"pinkie-size cylinders, to be lined up and encased in the familiar plastic brick. The system is similar for batteries tiny enough for an iPod or big enough for a car. Conveyor belts carried long, wafer-thin strips of metal into printing press-like rollers, which coated them with electrode-active material. Another machine sandwiched the strips between razor-thin layers of plastic and wound the whole stack together into a tight "jelly roll," a cylinder that looked, for the first time, like a battery. (Square cell-phone batteries are just jelly rolls squashed.) A slogan on the wall declared VARIATION IS THE BIGGEST ENEMY OF QUALITY. Gow nodded at it gravely. A bundle of batteries is only as good as its weakest cell; if a coating is five-millionths of a meter too thin or too thick, a car could be a lemon. The new plant will have up to 3,000 workers on ten-hour s.h.i.+fts, twenty hours a day. "When you get down to it, you can have ten people working in China for the cost of one person in the U.S.," Mark Atkeson, the head of Coda's China operations, said.

It was easy to see China's edge in the operation. Upstairs, Gow and Atkeson showed me America's edge: their prototype of the pack. For two years, Coda's engineers in California and their collaborators around the world have worked on making it as light and powerful as possiblea"a life of "optimizing millimeters," as Gow put it. The result was a long, shallow aluminum case, measured to fit between the axles and jam-packed with 728 rectan gular cells, topped with a fibergla.s.s case. It carried its own air conditioning system to prevent batteries from getting too cold or too hot. Rattling off arcane points, Gow caught himself. "There's hundreds of things that go into it, so there's hundreds of details," he said. "It's really a great field for people with OCD."

Czinger, in that sense, had found his niche. By November he was crisscrossing the Pacific, leading design teams on both sides; in the months since we first met, he had grown only more evangelical in his belief that if Americans would stop feeling threatened by China's progress on clean technology, they might glimpse their own strengths. Only his American engineers, he said, had the garage-innovation culture to spend "eighteen hours a day for two years to develop a new technology." But only in China had he discovered "the will to spend on infrastructure, and to do it at high speed." The result, he said, was a "state-of-the-art battery facility that was, two years ago, an empty field!"

America has a tradition of overestimating its rivals, and China is a convenient choice these days. But, as with j.a.pan's a generation ago, China's rapid advances in science and technology obscure some deeper limitations. In 2004 a group of U.S.-based Chinese scientists accused the 863 Program of cronyism, of funneling money into pet projects and unworthy labs. (A proverb popular among scientists goes, "Pavilions near the water receive the most moonlight.") When critics published their complaints in a Chinese-language supplement to the journal Nature, the government banned it. Less than two years later, Chen Jin, a star researcher at Shanghai Jiaotong University, who had received more than $10 million in grants to produce a Chinese microchip to rival Intel's, was discovered to have faked his results. It confirmed what many Chinese scientists said among themselves: the Chinese science system was riddled with plagiarism, falsified data, and conflicts of interest.

After the Chen Jin scandal, the 863 Program made changes. It began publis.h.i.+ng tenders on the web to invite broader partic.i.p.ation, and to cut down on conflicts of interest, it started a.s.signing evaluators randomly. But those measures couldn't solve a larger problem: the system that allowed China to master the production of wind turbines and batteries does not necessarily equip China to invent the energy technology that n.o.body has yet imagined. "Add as many mail coaches as you please, you will never get a railroad," the economist Joseph Schumpeter once wrote. Scale is not a subst.i.tute for radical invention, and the Chinese bureaucracy chronically discourages risk. In 1999 the government launched a small-business innovation fund, for instance, but its bureaucratic DNA tells it to place only safe bets. "They are concerned that, given that it's a public fund, if their failure rate is very high the review will not be very good and the public will say, 'Hey, you're wasting money,'" Xue Lan, the dean of the school of public policy at Tsinghua University, told me. "But a venture capitalist would say, 'It is natural that you'll have a lot of failures.'" Financing is not the only barrier to innovation. As an editorial last year in Nature put it, "An even deeper question is whether a truly vibrant scientific culture is possible without a more widespread societal commitment to free expression."

The Obama administration is busy repairing the energy legacy of its predecessor. The stimulus package pa.s.sed in February put more than $38 billion into the Department of Energy for renewable-energy projectsa"including $400 million for ARPA-E, the agency that Bush opposed. (It also allocated $1 billion toward reviving FutureGen, though a final decision is pending.) In announcing the opening of ARPA-E in April 2009, Obama vowed to return America's investment in research and development to a level not seen since the s.p.a.ce race. "The nation that leads the world in twenty-first-century clean energy will be the nation that leads in the twenty-first-century global economy," he said. "I believe America can and must be that nation."

An uninspiring version of that message is gaining currency in Congress; it frames American leaders.h.i.+p as manifesting not so much the courage to seize the initiative as the determination to prevent others from doing so. Senator Charles Schumer, one of several lawmakers who have begun to cast China's role in environmental technology as a threat to American jobs, has warned the Obama administration not to provide stimulus funds to a wind farm in Texas because many of the turbines would be made in China. ("We should not be giving China a head start in this race at our own country's expense," Schumer said in a statement.) Senators John Kerry and Lindsey Graham, in an op-ed in the Times, vowed not to "surrender our marketplace to countries that do not accept environmental standards" and suggested a "border tax" on clean-energy technology.

The larger fact, however, is that no single nation is likely to dominate the clean-energy economy. Goldwind, Coda, and the Thermal Power Research Inst.i.tute are hybrids of Western design and Chinese production, and no nation has yet mastered both the invention and the low-cost manufacturing of clean technology. It appears increasingly clear that winners in the new-energy economy will exploit the strengths of each side. President Obama seems inclined toward this view. When he visited Beijing in November, he and Hu Jintao cut several deals to share energy technology and know-how, which will accelerate progress in both countries. This was hardly a matter of handing technology to China; under one of the deals, for instance, the Missouri-based company Peabody Energy purchased a stake in GreenGen so that it can obtain data from, and lend expertise to, a cutting-edge Chinese power plant.

More important, the two presidents reignited hopes that climate negotiations in Copenhagen, which had been heading for failure, might reach a meaningful compromise. Days after the Beijing summit, China and the United States provided specific targets for controlling emissions. Their pledges were far from bold and left both sides open to criticism: China's emissions, after all, will continue to grow over time, and cuts pledged by the United States still fall far short of what scientists say is required to avert the worst effects of warming. Yet the commitments, for all their weakness, serve a crucial function: they prevent each side from using the other as a foil to justify inaction.

For the United States and China, the climate talks boil down to how much money the rich world will give poorer nations to help them acquire the technology to limit emissions and cope with the droughts, rising sea levels, and other effects caused by those who enjoyed two hundred years of burning cheap fossil fuels. Without sharing costs and technology, it is not at all clear, for instance, that China will invest in the holy grail of climate science: funneling greenhouse gases underground. The process, known as carbon capture and storage, or CCS, is so difficult and expensive that n.o.body has yet succeeded in using it on a large scale. Like electric cars and coal gasification, CCS would be cheaper to develop in China than in the United States, but China is not interested in paying for it alone. As long as a Chinese citizen earns less than one-seventh what his counterpart in America earns, China is unlikely to back down on the demand that it should be paid to slow down its economy and invest even more in energy technology. And on that point the sides remain far apart.

In November I was spending much of my time at Tsinghua University, a center of clean-tech research, seeing a string of new energy projects that might or might not succeed someday. (My favorite, science aside, is a biofuel based on the process of producing Chinese moons.h.i.+ne.) In a giant, bustling convention hall across town, models in slinky evening gowns and white fur stoles arrayed themselves around mockups of wind turbines as if they were hot rods. Beijing was so overrun with visiting MacArthur geniuses and n.o.bel laureates and Silicon Valley eminences, all angling to influence China's climate-change policy, that I had to triage conferences.

Traffic alone made it hard to get around. This year China overtook the United States as the world's largest car market, and much of Beijing is gridlocked every day. (Impossibly, the number of cars in the city is expected to double in seven years.) In desperation, I decided to buy an electric bicycle. China has put 100 million of them on the road in barely ten years, an unplanned phenomenon that, energy experts point out, happens to be a milestone: the world's first electric vehicle to go ma.s.s market. The 863 Program noticed, and last year it added a program to build a micro-electric car, inspired by bicycle components, for commuters. Researchers at Tsinghua did just that, by attaching four electric-bike motors to a cha.s.sis. "We call it the Hali," Ouyang Minggao, the Tsinghua professor in charge of it, told me. They took the name from the Chinese translation of "Harry Potter." The car is tiny and bulbous and is being road-tested near Shanghai.

Hunting for an e-bike, I ended up at a string of shops near the Tsinghua campus, where each storefront offered a competing range of prices and styles to a clientele dominated by students and young families. I settled on a model called the Turtle Kinga"a simple contraption, black and styled like a Vespa, with a 500-watt brushless motor and disc brakes. Built of plastic to save weight, it was more akin to a scooter than to a bicycle, and it ran on a pair of lead-acid batteries, similar to those under the hood of a car. The salesman said that the bike would run for twenty to thirty miles, depending on how fast I went, before I would need to plug its cord into the wall for eight hours or lug the batteries inside to charge. With a top speed of around twenty-five miles per hour, it would do little for the ego, but, at just over $500, it was worth a try.

The manager rang up the sale, and I chatted with two buyers who were students at the Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics. 'You must have tons of these in the U.S., because you're always talking about environmental consciousness," one of them, an industrial-design major wearing a Che Guevara T-s.h.i.+rt, said. Not really, I told him; American drivers generally use bikes for exercise, not transportation. He looked baffled. Around his campus and others in Beijing, electric bikes are as routine as motorcycles are in the hill towns of Italy.

I eased the Turtle King down over the curb and accelerated to full speed, such as it was. I threaded through an intersection clotted with honking traffic, and the feeling, I discovered, was sublime. The Turtle King was addictive. I began riding it everywhere, showing up early for appointments, flush with efficiency and a soupon of moral superiority. For years people had abandoned Beijing's bicycle lanes in favor of cars, but now the bike lanes were alive again, in an unruly showcase of innovation. Young riders souped up their bikes into status symbols, pulsing with flas.h.i.+ng lights and subwoofers; construction workers drove them like mules, laden down to the axles with sledgehammers and drills and propane tanks; parents with kids' seats on the back drifted through rush-hour traffic and reached school on time. Before long I was coveting an upgrade to a lithium-ion battery, which is lighter and runs longer. (Lithium-ion batteries have sparked interest in electric bikes in the West. They are a high-minded new accessory in Paris, and more than a few have even turned up in America.) As a machine, the Turtle King was in desperate need of improvement. The chintzy horn broke the first day. The battery never went as far as advertised, and it was so heavy that I narrowly missed breaking some toes as it crashed to the ground on the way into the living room. Soon the sharp winter wind in Beijing was testing my commitment to transportation al fresco. And yet, for all its imperfections, the Turtle King was so much more practical than sitting in a stopped taxi or crowding onto a Beijing bus that it had become what all new-energy technology is somehow supposed to be: cheap, simple, and un.o.btrusive enough that using it is no longer a matter of sacrifice but one of self-interest.

GEORGE BLACK India, Enlightened.

FROM OnEarth.

AT SEVEN O'CLOCK on a late February morning the scene is much as you'd imagine it, much as you've seen it, perhaps, in a score of earnest doc.u.mentaries or in the highlight reels at this year's Oscars. In the slums of Delhi, a man pedals a bicycle laden with milk cans along a narrow, dusty lane swarming with people. A family of five squeezes into the back of a green-and-yellow autorickshaw meant for three. Somnolent cows lie in a field of garbage beside the railroad tracks, where an endless line of rusted coal cars rolls past, off to fuel some factory or power plant south of the city. Half-naked children squat among the discarded plastic bags and food wrappers to do their morning business. No one really knows how many people live here in the hutments of Okhla; 80,000 perhaps. And not a slumdog millionaire in sight.

Up on the footbridge that crosses the tracks, an old man in a filthy dhoti and turban shuffles past a torn notice advertising jobs for "marketing and tele-calling executives." The ad is a dispatch from another India, the new India, which lies, both literally and figuratively, on the other side of the tracks. You can't see it now, but it's out there somewhere in the smog, which is backlit to an opaque yellow-brown by the rising sun. As the day progresses and some of the haze burns off, shapes will start to emerge: the forest of cranes, the towers of blue steel and reflective gla.s.s, the billboards with words like Vodafone and Airtel and Intelenet, the Center Stage Mall and the Spice World Mall, and the call centers of the New Okhla Industrial Development Authority (NOIDA). It's Chinese workers who fill the shelves at Walmart with Christmas tree ornaments and socket wrench sets, but it's Indian workers in places like this who answer those phone queries about your credit card bill or your airline reservation, each call helping to build India's $11-billion-a-year outsourcing industry.

In this new India, faucets run all day. Lights burn all night. s.h.i.+ny new cars zip into the center of Delhi on the DND Flyway. Water, energy, mobility: three defining elements of the escape from poverty. Such modest goals, but for most Indians still so painfully hard to achieve.

Looking out at NOIDA, at the towers and the smog, I wondered whether India could have it both ways. Could more than a billion people have the prosperity without the environmental havoc, in a country that is already struggling with the impact of a changing climate? Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had seemed to suggest as much in a speech launching India's National Action Plan on Climate Change in June 2008. Rapid economic growth was nonnegotiable, Singh said, if people were "to discard the ignominy of widespread poverty." At the same time, he promised that India would follow "a path of ecologically sustainable development." In seeking to reconcile these two goals, he pointed to the country's "civilizational legacy, which treats Nature as a source of nurture and not as a dark force to be conquered and harnessed to human endeavour."

What did that have to do with NOIDA? Perhaps one hint lay in a pa.s.sage from Aravind Adiga's best-selling novel, The White Tiger, which won the Man Booker Prize four months after Singh's speech. The sardonic antihero writes to the Chinese premier, Wen Jiabao: "Apparently, sir, you Chinese are far ahead of us in every respect, except that you don't have entrepreneurs. And our nation, though it has no drinking water, electricity, sewage system, public transportation, sense of hygiene, discipline, courtesy, or punctuality, does have entrepreneurs. Thousands and thousands of them."

Could this new entrepreneurial spirit be harnessed to provide India's poor with the three essentials that NOIDA takes for granteda"water, energy, and mobility? There seemed only one way to test the proposition: to embark on a journey that would give me a sampling of this astoundingly diverse and complicated country, from its mountains to its deserts and back again to the city. And the prime minister's speech seemed to suggest where I should start looking for answersa"by going to the river that is the cradle of India's civilizational legacy.

The Water Tower of Asia.

The Hindu pilgrimage town of Ris.h.i.+kesh in the Himalayan foothills, where John, Paul, George, and Ringo spent the early months of 1968 in thrall to the Maharis.h.i.+ Mahesh Yogi, sits on the banks of the Ganges, which Indians call the Ganga.

On the outskirts of town, an imposing line of high-tension electricity pylons marched southward from the mountains, carrying power to Delhi and the cities of the plain. Nearby was a poster advertising Ambuja Cement. A heroically muscled man, chin raised, gaze fixed on the future, clutched a gigantic dam under his arm. Ambuja is a private corporation, but the artwork suggested Soviet-era socialist realism.

Coal still accounts for 55 percent of India's energy mix, but hydro supplies 26 percent. That's an unusually high proportiona"China, for all the publicity about Three Gorges, generates only about 7 percent of its power from damsa"and India's climate plan a.s.sumes that hydro will continue to expand steadily. The plan also speaks at some length about the potential for large-scale solar power, since most of the country has clear, sunny skies for 250 to 300 days a year. But solar is expensive, and hydro, despite the huge economic and environmental cost of dams, remains the cheapest of all conventional energy sources.

On the other side of Ris.h.i.+kesh, a few miles upstream, an intense young woman named Priya Patel sat cross-legged in the garden of an ashram and showed me a map of the headwaters of the Ganga. Small rectangular symbols marked the site of proposed hydroelectric projects. Patel is the unofficial leader of the Ganga Ahvaan, a campaign to stop them.

There is already one colossal dam on the upper river at Tehri, which came into operation in 2006 and produces about 2,400 megawatts. (By way of comparison, the Hoover Dam generates about 2,000 megawatts, and Tehri is about 100 feet higher.) The new dams, impoundments, and diversion tunnels on Patel's map would add another 5,000 megawatts to the mix. I counted about two dozen new sites, more or less equally divided between the Bhagirathi and the Alaknanda, the two rivers that come together to form the main stem of the Ganga at the small town of Devaprayag. Patel said that the first of these structures, the 380-megawatt Bhaironghati I, would be built just eight or nine miles below the Gangotri glacier, where the Bhagirathi originates in an ice cave. The diversion tunnels and proposed minimum flows would dry up miles of riverbed, she said, and to make matters worse, all these ma.s.sive engineering works were being planned in one of the highest-risk earthquake zones in the world. When a 6.6-magnitude quake hit the Bhagirathi valley in 1991, the greatest number of casualties occurred in a village that sits on top of one of the new tunnels.

"But surely they must have done an environmental impact a.s.sessment?" I asked.

She smiled without humor and enumerated some of the a.s.surances that had been given by the National Thermal Power Corporation, including one that promised that "no historical, religious, or cultural monuments" would be affected by the dams. Of course, the Ganga itself is the sacred core of India's national ident.i.ty, but the irony of this seemed to have escaped the government.

Later I made the b.u.mpy three-hour drive upriver along a tortuous corniche hundreds of feet above the Ganga until I reached the confluence at Devaprayag. The town is built on a narrow, triangular point of rocks that ends in a ghat a"the ubiquitous riverside steps where Hindus gather to wash, bathe, wors.h.i.+p, and burn their dead. The Bhagirathi, a foaming torrent colored turquoise by silt from the Gangotri glacier, rushed in from the west. From the east, the Alaknanda was an unbroken slick of emerald between sheer cliffs. But the waters were much lower than usual, people said. It had been a strange winter, unusually warm and raining only once, a brief downpour a few days before I arrived. Peaches that normally fruited in April were ripe in February.

It was the second day of the festival of Mahas.h.i.+varatri, a celebration of Lord s.h.i.+va, the Destroyer, which is one of the most important events in the Hindu calendar. Pilgrims and priests had gathered on the lower steps of the ghat, knee-deep in the water, one foot in turquoise, the other in green. The wall behind them was scrawled with Hindi graffiti. Translated, it said, "Dam Is Murderer of Ganga."

The flow of India's sacred river is of much more than local concern. Fully one-fifth of all humanity depends for its survival on the great rivers that are born among the glaciers of the Himalayas, which some people call the water tower of Asia. But even as the downstream demand for water increases, the upstream supply is contracting, because the glaciers are melting, and rapidly.

Before leaving Delhi for the mountains I'd talked to Syed Iqbal Hasnain, India's best-known glaciologist. A jovial, white-haired, grandfatherly man, he punctuated his gloomy observations with improbable bursts of laughter.

"The Ganga system is about 60 to 70 percent snow and ice," he told me. "There are more than eight hundred glaciers in the Ganga basin. The Gangotri is the big one. It used to cover more than 250 square kilometers [about 100 square miles], but now it's breaking up in many places. You will see blocks of dead ice that are no 1 onger connected to the main ice body. I'm afraid that if the current trends continue, within thirty or forty years most of the glaciers will melt out." He chuckled.

No one could fail to notice the changes in the Himalayan weather, Hasnain said: "The monsoons are being affected by climate change. We are not getting the westerlies, which bring snow in the wintertime. Crops like potatoes, peas, and apples are growing at higher alt.i.tudes now. At lower elevations the temperatures are no longer suitable.

"There's also the atmospheric 'brown cloud,' a layer of dust particles three kilometers thick, which is warming the glaciers and creating all these anomalies," he went on. "And black soot is being deposited on the white ice of the Tibetan plateau." Together the soot and dust reduce the albedo (from the Latin albus, or white)a"the amount of solar radiation reflected back into the atmosphere. Instead it is absorbed by the darkened ice. The dust is mainly from fossil fuel emissions, with China the princ.i.p.al culprit. Most of the soot comes from cooking fires on the Indian side, a seemingly trivial source that in fact generates huge amounts of highly polluting "black carbon." I was surprised when Hasnain told me that even the firewood and kerosene burned by the growing numbers of pilgrims to the Gangotri temple and nearby ashrams have a significant impact on the glacier.

The government misreads, or perhaps chooses to misread, these symptoms, Hasnain complained. "Because the glaciers are melting, a lot of water is flowing downstream," he said. "They think, the water is coming, people are happy, so why rake up all these issues of climate change?"

The melting also poses a direct threat to the new hydropower projects, he said. More glacial melt means more silt, and more silt means clogged turbines and incapacitated dams. No one was thinking about that either. "There's a total disconnect," Hasnain said, "between those who are designing these power projects and what is happening on the headwaters." He laughed again.

He said that measuring the precise extent of glacier loss was not easy, and the government's climate action plan had used this shortage of hard data to justify a disturbingly agnostic view of the problem. All the plan says is that "it is too early to establish long-term trends" and that there are "several hypotheses" about the reasons for the great melting. Part of the difficulty is that outside monitors are not welcome in areas that border on China and Pakistan: a matter of national security. You can figure out a certain amount by satellite imagerya"even by looking at Google Eartha"and it's not hard to measure the distance by which a particular glacier has advanced or receded. But the critical issue is what glaciologists call ma.s.s balance, the most sensitive indicator of the impact of climate change, and measuring this requires getting up into the high peaks and taking ice-core samples. Hasnain said he had begun to work with the celebrated glaciologist Lonnie Thompson of Ohio State University. "He's the leader in the ice-core business," Hasnain said. "So in four or five years we may have a credible database." He was no longer laughing now.

Under the Desert Sun.

The Ganga Ahvaan campaign was launched in an unlikely place: the former palace of Maharaja Gaj Singh Ji of Marwar-Jodhpur, on the edge of the Thar Desert in western Rajasthan, India's most drought-stricken state. It is also the largest, with 56 million people in an area slightly larger than New Mexico. If India ever realizes its ambition of building affordable, large-scale solar power installations, this will be one of the prime locations.

The palace, a sprawling sandstone complex a few miles outside the ancient city of Jodhpur, is home to the Jal Bhagirathi Foundation. An odd name, I remarked to its director, Kanupriya Harish, considering that we were out in the desert, that jal means water, and that the Bhagirathi River is hundreds of miles away in the Himalayas.

Not really, she said with a smile, because the word Bhagirathi also has another significance. In Hindu legend, a king named Bhagirath had to do penance for several centuries so that the G.o.ddess Ganga would forgive the sins of his ancestors. Finally she granted his wish and decided to come down to Earth, taking the form of a great river.

"Anything that is very hard to do is called Bhagirath prayah," Harish explained. "A very difficult task. And since there is nothing harder than to find water in the desert, that is how we got our name."

Finding enough water is a problem in most of India, and it's getting harder all the time. In theory there should be enough for everyone, since the overall precipitation levels are tremendous. But most of the rain falls in the three-month monsoon season, and in recent years it has been more and more concentrated into a small number of intense downpours. In a single twenty-four-hour period in 2005, for instance, Mumbai got 39 inches of rain. But if the water isn't captured in a timely fas.h.i.+on, it's lost, and India contrives to lose it in myriad ways, including profligate irrigation, degraded infrastructure, and a failure to treat and reuse wastewater. Rajasthan Isn't Mumbai, of course; much of the Thar Desert gets only about four inches of rain a year. But the same weather patterns are apparent, Harish said. If the meager rainfall is spread out over several weeks, people can get by, more or less, scratching out a bare subsistence by cultivating lentils, millet, and a poor variety of sesame seeds. However, such rain as there is in the Thar comes more often now in a single, violent burst. "Most of the work we're doing now is actually an adaptive strategy to climate change," Harish said.

In Delhi, Ramaswamy Iyer, a former government official who drafted India's first national water plan in 1987, had told me he saw three basic options for dealing with the water crisis. You can increase the supply by ma.s.sive engineering projectsa"dams, ca.n.a.ls, the interlinking of major river systems. You can leave it to the market to supply and price water as it would any other commodity. Or you can treat water as a community resource, making decisions at the local level and educating people about conservation. The Indian government has relied heavily on the first two strategies; Kanupriya Harish favors the third.

In earlier times, she said, people in the Thar developed all sorts of creative techniques for harvesting and conserving water. But the collective memory of these skills began to dissipate after independence, when the expectation grew (though it was often ill-founded) that the government would come in, lay a pipe, and solve the problem. The critique of government was a thread that ran through almost every conversation I had in India: no matter how grand various schemes might look on paper, most were beset by bureaucratic inertia, crippling inefficiencies, and a culture of corruption that allowed budgeted funds to drain away into private pockets like water into the desert sands.

Local people could act with much greater agility, Harish said, and communities could develop entrepreneurial skills along the way. The trick was to revive the old, forgotten techniques and combine them with the smartest of the new technologies. She snapped open her laptop and launched into a brisk PowerPoint presentation to show me the spectrum of possibilities. At one end, a woman dug a hole in the sand to collect seepage. At the other, an improbable high-tech structure, shaped like a pyramid, offered a way to harvest Rajasthan's scarcest resourcea"watera"by using its most abundanta"the desert sun.

That sun beat down mercilessly all the next day. It was still winter, and by the standards of the Thar it was not especially hota"95 degrees or so. We drove west through a landscape of rolling dunes and spiny scrub, innumerable camel carts, wild peac.o.c.ks scurrying across the baking sand. Along the way we saw many of the water-harvesting structures Harish had described in her PowerPoint. There were beris and tankas and talabsa"shallow and deep wells, ground-level and rooftop storage tanks, ponds large and small. Women walked away from a water hole with heavy pitchers on their heads, climbing uphill through a grove of th.o.r.n.y khejri trees. Harish told me that these are still zealously protected by members of the local Bishnoi castea"the original tree-huggers, who sacrificed their lives in a ma.s.sacre in 1730 rather than allow the khejri to be cut down by the local maharaja.

As we drew closer to the border with Pakistan, the land was dotted with white salt flats, left behind by the evaporation of last year's monsoons. At one point a man in camouflage fatigues waved us off the one-lane road and ordered us to loop around across the salt flats. For hundreds of yards ahead the roadway was occupied by a long column of battle tanks.

I asked my taciturn driver if he thought India and Pakistan would go to war.

"Inevitable," he grunted, seeming almost to relish the idea.