For the last couple of years, Hu has been saying that China neither has to nor should follow the path of the developed countries. It has to take the road to an eco-friendly economy by providing incentives to green consumers and green services.

Setting a goal is most important, he says, because only after that can we draw a road map and choose technical solutions. Less than three months are left for the UN climate change conference in Copenhagen, but China has not yet announced its position on how fast it will reduce its carbon footprint. Varying proposals are in circulation on how to balance the country's national interest and the fight against climate change.

The Kyoto Protocol, the global treaty on mitigating climate change, came into being in 1997 and expires in 2012. It does not require developing countries, including China, to reduce their GHG emission to a certain level. It imposes a mandatory cut on developed countries, though, many of them have either refused to ratify it (such as the US) or have failed to meet the reduction levels.

Despite that, China has been trying to cut its emission levels. For the past few years, it has set its own goals for energy efficiency and pollution control, though it falls short of a comprehensive plan.

World leaders will meet in New York (at the UN General Assembly) and Pittsburgh (for the second G20 summit this year) later this month to hopefully narrow their differences on climate change. But as an expert both in economics and the environment, Hu doubts whether the countries will achieve a breakthrough in climate change talks any time soon.

"What we have," he says, "is a community of more than 6 billion people from over 200 economies, and they are divided into two large competing camps, the developed and the developing countries."

"This kind of bargaining, I'm afraid, will not help realize a fruitful deal in Copenhagen," Hu says. The truth is that global warming is a problem of the developed and the developing countries both.

After 30 years of rapid economic development, China is no longer a typical developing country. But that rapid pace of development has also made China (along with the US) the largest GHG emitter in the world. "And this is exactly where my interests as an internationalist meet my aspiration as a patriot," he says.

While appealing to the public, Hu is also trying to get some of his ideas into the country's next Five-Year Plan. There are five areas, he says, that the country should concentrate on before 2020. It should:

Continue to reduce pollution and cut the discharge of major pollutants by 10 percent every 5 years;

Conduct intensive research in green technologies and make them the economy's core competitive elements;

Increase the use of clean energy to 20 percent of the total and make the country a leading global market for alternative energy technologies and know-how; and

Make the country the world's largest afforested place by planting more trees.

None of these, he says, is just a tactic for dealing with the mounting external pressure. Green industries and green technologies are tools for China to create new opportunities.

"Our commitment must be serious," Hu says. "That should be the way for China to grow into a future world leader it should replace the bad examples of the developed countries with new workable examples for sustainable economic growth."