In August, the leaders of Japan, China and South Korea will hold a trilateral summit to discuss how they can pool their resources and expertise to develop and commercialize emerging green technologies.

Demolition work takes place near a wind farm in Rudong in China’s Jiangsu province on June 2, 2009

But with public debt now equal to 82% of GDP and the budget deficit forecast to hit $1.4 trillion next year, the U.S. is in no position to spend more.

In contrast, East Asian economies have robust balance sheets, except for Japan. Unlike the U.S., China and South Korea do not need to print money to fund their stimulus packages. And their spending is geared toward the future rather than
toward mopping up the excesses of the past, as the U.S. must do. Green projects account for 81% of South Korea’s economic-stimulus programs and 38% of China’s — the proportion in the U.S. is just 12%.

Above all, the East Asians appear more committed to a green agenda than the U.S. is. South Korea has adopted “low-carbon green growth” as its new national vision and will spend $40 billion over four years to transform its old-school industrial policy into “a new paradigm of qualitative growth which uses less energy and is more compatible with environmental sustainability,” in the words of Prime Minister Han Seung-Soo, whose previous job was special envoy on climate change for the U.N. Secretary-General.

Will East Asia win the green wars? It’s not a foregone conclusion. The Europeans, who are leading the way on carbon-trading, are very much in the game, particularly in recycling and solar and wind power. Japan, China and South Korea also have some delicate issues to settle. One of the most contentious is likely to be intellectual-property protection, which is not particularly strong in China.

The U.S. may still be a contender. Sputnik sparked an extraordinary American effort that culminated in Neil Armstrong’s 1969 moon walk, which sealed the U.S.’s supremacy in space. This week, Washington launched a $25 billion program
to extend cheap loans to carmakers to help in reconfiguring their assembly lines for electric and other fuel-efficient vehicles. Interestingly, the money is available to not only America’s Ford but also Japan’s Nissan for one of its American factories.

East Asia’s bid for economic leadership in the low-carbon age may push the Americans — and certainly the Europeans — to intensify their engagement with green technologies. The space race spawned a lot of the advances in technology that we take for granted today. The green wars may do the same thing for low-carbon products and processes. If so, it’s a conflict the world must be willing to fight.

VietNamNet/Time Magazine