Washington, D.C.’s bike sharing program has 1,100 bikes. London’s system has 6,000. And Paris has more than 20,000.

But on the other side of the globe, Hangzhou, China has them beat with more than 60,000, according to a recent report by National Geographic.

To see how it all works, check out this short from Streetfilms:

Bike shares -- where a user can pick up a bicycle at one service point, ride it, and then drop it off at another and walk away -- are growing in popularity. China, along with many other developing nations, has a long-held cultural tie to bicycling. Demand for automobiles skyrocketed in recent decades, but in a city of 6.7 million like Hangzhou, it would be impossible to build enough roads to support this, not to mention environmental concerns.

Bike shares are cheap (nearly free for many in Hangzhou), highly accessible, and part of a sustainable urban growth model. Hangzhou hopes to expand its system to 120,000 bikes by 2020 and other cities are taking notice of its success. Companies in Beijing, Rio de Janeiro, and Mexico City are making a go of it and hope to remove the training wheels soon.

At Green School in rural Bali, K-12 students learn not only the staples of a traditional education — reading, writing and arithmetic — but also how to grow organic rice and build with sustainably produced bamboo. Students from the local community, as well as around the world come to receive a "green education." The holistic approach taken by the teachers is intended to develop the "whole person" in students, and helps them adopt a more responsible and sustainable lifestyle, Green School founder and Principal John Hardy explains in his TED talk.

Green school is a place of pioneers — local and global, and it’s a kind of microcosm of the globalized world. The kids are from 25 countries. When I see them together I know they’re working out how to live in the future.

In John Hardy's TED talk below he shares his inspiration for Green School, and what he sees for the school's future.

China's Three Gorges Dam, the world's largest hydro-electric power station. Photo: PVCG (flickr)

Can China go green without disrupting their economic growth?

Fossil fuels provide most of the energy powering the world’s post populated country, but last month China committed to producing more energy from cleaner sources.

Liu Zhenya — the president of China's largest electric provider — said that China aims to produce 35 percent of its energy from "low-emissions" sources by 2020 at a press conference in Beijing, tells Bloomberg.com.

China is currently the world's leader in renewable energy production. However, a study by Wharton University shows that low emissions sources like hydro-electricity, wind power, and solar power make up only 8 percent of the nation's total energy capacity.

China’s demand for energy is expected to double over the next decade as well — increasing consumption rates, massive amounts of industrial exports, and construction growth could potentially push electricity consumption to nearly 8 trillion kilowatt-hours a year. At that rate China would consume twice as much the United States, which is the next biggest energy consumer after China.

Considering that China’s growth in energy consumption has more than tripled the world’s average in past years and nearly 90 percent of China's energy still comes from coal and oil, the Wharton University report estimates that the nation will need $3.7 trillion to maintain its projected energy growth.

For China, the numbers don’t add up. Their demand for energy is going to double over the next eleven years and the majority of their energy capacity is highly dependent on coal. The climb to 35 percent is either going to be relatively steep or they are going to spend a lot of money converting fossil fuels.