No wall around China: sustainable policies must be global to be effective.

• Author: Best, Allen

Coal is the miracle fuel, potent and plentiful. It has been at the heart of U.S. prosperity, providing 49 percent of electricity, a form of energy so useful we often just call it "power." In coal-rich Colorado, nearly 70 percent of electricity is created by burning coal. In Wyoming it's 97 percent.

The story is much the same in China, just lately emerging from poverty into prosperity. There, hundreds of new power plants have been built in recent decades, supplying 60 percent of the electricity used to power motors, compressors and other devices that have made the brand, "Made in China," ubiquitous in Wal-Mart and virtually every other American store.

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In this prosperity also lies potential peril. Hundreds of miners die every year in China, more yet in the United States. Far greater catastrophe is posed by accumulating greenhouse gases. Best known is carbon dioxide, now nearing 390 parts per million in the atmosphere, up from 250 parts in pre-industrial times. The burning of coal, oil and other fossil fuels is believed the primary cause of this planet-warming greenhouse gas.

In this simple trans-Pacific arc also lies a metaphor for this year's Fourth Annual Sustainable Opportunities Summit: Global Sustainability in Denver on March 17-19. Richard Eidlin, a CORE member who helped pick speakers and themes, says the goal is to think about the complicated issues holistically, to see how the pieces fit together, to better detect opportunities and solutions.

"These sessions are designed to cover a range of issues -be they forestry, or coal, water depletion or corporate behavior in the marketplace - and try to make a linkage between these specific issues and how they are all connected," says Eidlin, who has been engaged in the renewable energy industry for 15 years.

"We are trying to point out that sustain-ability is a comprehensive view of the world, and it is a set of actions that lead to a certain set of consequences, which could be beneficial or negative in impacts to the environment and society."

The complexities are apparent in the Chinese-American calculus about coal. China in 2007 surpassed the United States as the world's leading emitter of carbon dioxide. However, per capita emissions remain far less. But in a way, Chinese pollution is American pollution. After all, China has become America's factory. In outsourcing our production, we've also outsourced our pollution. Except, given the global nature of warming...