CEF Director Jennifer Turner was interviewed by CNN, commenting on a smog documentary that exceeded 200 million views under a week and answering questions about the film's historical impacts on raise Chinese people's awareness for environmental problems.
"It's a very powerful film and she's an excellent investigative journalist. But she is also tapped into one of the very real fears that the Chinese public has had - they've seen air quality got worse and worse in the last few years," said Turner. She thinks the producer is not just a fear-monger, however, but was also trying to create a primer of the source of pollution. Not only the pollutant industries were criticized, poor governance and regulation were also pointed out in the documentary.
''What I thought was really positive about it was that how many people spoke to her quite openly, government, researchers, people on the street obviously," said Turner and she believes this shows Chinese people's willingness to get the information out. The CEF director also expressed her optimistic attitude towards China's future environment as the central government is the largest investor in clean energy technologies in the world now and since last year, Beijing, together with the United States, also committed to cap China's coal consumption. "Their coal consumption, for the first time in the last decade, dropped about two percent last year." However, since coal accounts for 70 percent of China's energy consumption now, it will be like "turning a Titanic".
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