Not enough

Li, of the NDRC, also said that China should continue making more efforts to cope with climate change.

"It is never enough to do good things, but a bit of bad things could be more than enough." he said.

Li said individual behaviors unfriendly to the environment have become a real obstacle for tackling the climate change in China. "Compared with developing clean energy, it will be more difficult to change people's consumption perception and behavior."

Li said that in recent years, like American customers, China's newly affluent have come to prefer buying oil-guzzling vehicles, bigger apartments and higher-power air conditioners, which would "lead to terrible consequences."

Bernice Lee said the whole world, including China, has not done enough to limit global temperature rise to 2 degrees above pre-industrial level, which scientists regard as the limit of safety beyond which warming is likely to become disastrous.

"China's current focus is on energy saving and efficiency, as well as the scaling up of renewables and nuclear. At this point in time China will probably want to ensure that its economic recovery will go hand-in-hand with building a low carbon economy," she said.

In the medium term, she suggested that this will involve re-balancing the proportions of primary, secondary, and tertiary sectors, as well as finding cost efficient solutions to meet infrastructural needs.

Liu, the software company advisor, said it is necessary for Chinese people across the country to act together and make individual contributions to global efforts on climate change.

Liu said what he has been doing in the past 10 years to protect the environment include: taking his own toothbrush when checking into hotels, commuting on buses more often, and never giving up such practices.

(Xinhua News Agency November 4, 2009)