Community | August 21, 2009 | 11 comments

World's first carbon positive city will be in China

source: http://abcnews.go.com/International/JustOneThing/Story?id=8327868&page=1

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Yu Qun's journey into a low-carbon future began with a bad case of smelly fish.

Scarcely had Mr. Yu been named mayor of this city 100 miles southwest of Beijing when fish in his region's largest lake began dying by the thousands. He had only one option, he felt: to close several hundred factories whose pollution was to blame.

That cost his city nearly two percentage points in annual economic growth – the Holy Grail by which Chinese officials have long been measured. And it taught him a lesson.

"Polluting first and cleaning up later is very expensive," says the boyish-looking mayor, a former college math teacher. "So we chose renewable energy to replace traditional industry."

In three years, Yu has transformed Baoding from an automobile and textile town into the fastest-growing hub of solar, wind, and biomass energy-equipmentmakers in China. Baoding now has the highest growth rate of any city in Hebei Province. Its "Electricity Valley" industrial cluster – consciously modeled on Silicon Valley – has quadrupled its business.
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