Re: Bad poll?
They're building every kind of power plant they can. New coal plants in China, just by the by, are typically outfitted with as much technology as possible to control pollution. China's pollution problem isn't from new power plants, it's from two things:
1) Old power plants that haven't yet been retrofitted. (And China is retrofitting them, one at a time.) And more than any other issue:
2) Chinese homes burn coal is the least efficient and more polluting way possible for heat.
China is a polluted mess. But they honestly are working their asses off to solve it. They are building hydro at a record pace*. They are building nuke plants as fast as they possible can. They have deployed more renewables than anyone.
In short: they are building electrical generation as quickly as they can in part because of growing demand but primairily so that they can get those polluting coal-burning homes off of coal-based heat and onto electrical heating.
A lot of that has to do with air quality. A lot of that has to do with energy independence. But it also has to do with climate change. China is capping CO2 emissions. They are also going to aggressively lower those caps year on year. They don't suffer from "the Yankee politburo sayeth nyet" syndrome: this is The Plan and they are fucking dead serious about this.
You can even judge China's seriousness. We are past the midpoint of the first Five Year Plan in which climate change and CO2 were seriously addressed. All indications I've seen are that they are on target not only to meet the stated goals.
China is building low-carbon business and industrial (development zones) and low-carbon residential communities. Other than a couple of middle eastern nations, who's doing this in a planned, national fashion? China's even implemented cap-and-trade on CO2, for $deity's sake!
Why don't you take some time to China's National Climate Change Programme for yourself? Learn something for once instead of letting your biases and nationalism turn off your brain. Maybe if you stopped just believing anything the media tells you without question you'd see that a nation that made a bunch of mistakes is trying damned hard to undo them...and putting their "betters" (like the USA) to shame.
"There's no point in the USA curbing CO2 emissions because China won't" is outright bullshit. China could have said "there's no point in China curbing CO2 emissions because the US won't." Instead, they just went ahead and started working the problem. There's a reason China is the world's superpower and the US is in decline: they aren't an entire nation of whiny bitches.
*Your bullshit about "they'll crumble in 20 years" is nothing more than xenophobic tripe. If you had any evidence whatsoever that there was corruption in building those dams the Chinese would too. And the corrupt would be DEAD. Corruption is a capital crime in that country, and they execute a lot of people for it every year. Not just scapegoats. They've executed top officials for it. You really don't seem to understand that country at all.