According to a new study, China's carbon dioxide emissions last year were the largest in the world.

The study, released by the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency, says that in 2006, China produced 6,200 metric tonnes of CO2 pollution, compared with 5,800 metric tonnes from the United States, which has long been the world's top climate polluter. One reason for China's massive CO2 emissions is that over the years, the West has effectively exported a great portion of its manufacturing there.

"The only thing corporations were interested in was the price of labor," said Greenpeace UK executive director John Sauven on his blog. "This trend kept the price of our products and inflation down, but at the cost of soaring greenhouse gas emissions in China. In the long term, this policy has been a climate disaster. It's the downside of globalisation."

Coal accounts for 69 percent of the primary energy in China, which is 42 percent higher than the world's average.  And China is beginning to realize the consequences of burning fossil fuels, not least because it is already suffering serious impacts from climate change including worsening typhoons, desertification and melting glaciers.

"To develop in a cleaner way is possible," said Greenpeace China Climate and Energy Campaign Manager Ailun Yang. "China has to decouple its economic development from the consumption of polluting fossil fuels.  The Chinese government needs to raise the development ambitions for renewable energies and implement its binding energy efficiency targets."