Opinion | China's carbon pollution could match US on per capita basis by 2017
China emits twice the carbon dioxide of US just three years after it overtook America as planet's worst greenhouse polluter
Two news items about the environment that have emerged in the past few weeks paint a worrying picture as Beijing scrambles to boost infrastructure spending and stimulate the mainland's slowing economy.
The Environmental Protection Law, the most important green legislation in the country, is undergoing its first overhaul since 1989.
The long-anticipated move has been hailed as a step in the right direction, rekindling hope that authorities may start tackling the loopholes and lax enforcement blamed for massive environmental damage.
The other story to grab headlines, about China's poor energy efficiency, revealed the flip side of the nation's vaunted economic success and raised doubts about the sustainability of its growth model.
A recent study, sponsored partly by Beijing's municipal government, revealed that the mainland's energy intensity, an internationally adopted measure of energy efficiency, is not only far higher than industrialised nations, but much higher than developing nations such as Brazil and Mexico.
Primarily due to its growing reliance on dirty coal, China consumes seven times more energy than Japan and 2.8 times more than India to produce one unit of GDP.