Down in the comments, Slinger points to Peter Ford’s Christian Science Monitor story on China’s greenhouse gas reduction noises:

With China’s carbon footprint expected to outsize America’s within a year, officials in Beijing appear to be backing away from their view that global warming is a Western problem that developed countries must solve.

While still insisting on their right to industrialize hundreds of millions of Chinese out of poverty, Chinese leaders are showing the first tentative signs of readiness to accept mandatory emissions-reductions targets. And they are setting themselves all kinds of green goals.

As the world’s No. 2 greenhouse-gas culprit – closing in on the 6 billion tons of CO2 produced by the US annually – China is under pressure both from other nations and from its own scientists’ predictions of a potentially catastrophic future if global warming is not curbed.

“Climate change has become a huge challenge to China’s social and economic sustained development,” Zheng Guoguang, head of the China Meteorological Administration, said Monday. “China is determined to mitigate and respond to climate change as a responsible nation.”

(As an aside, Peter Spotts and the other Monitor staffers do an excellent job on this topic, and they’ve recently set up a site to collect their work. New Mexicans who click through will see the fabulous moustache of our own snowpack guy Richard Armijo.)