The
NYT reports today that China does not expect to meet its short-term energy efficiency targets.
Despite huge investment in new technologies, China is finding it difficult to make its economy more energy-efficient, a senior official said Thursday.
The acknowledgment of difficulties by Zhang Laiwu, deputy minister for science and technology, comes as China has become the world’s largest auto market and is spending heavily on high-speed rail and other infrastructure projects that require a lot of steel and cement, which are energy-intensive to make.
That China is unlikely to hit its targets
should not be a surprise (
see also this PDF). What I did find eye-popping in the article was the projections of the size of the automobile market in China in coming years:
While China is investing heavily in electric cars, they are still years away from reaching the market in numbers large enough to affect overall Chinese energy consumption, executives said Thursday at the Global Automotive Forum in Chengdu.
Xiao Guopu, the director and vice president of the Shanghai Automotive Industry Corporation, one of China’s largest automakers, said his company planned to sell 20,000 plug-in hybrid cars in 2012 and 50,000 in 2015, with electric cars still being developed.
Wang Dazong, the president of Beijing Auto, said that China’s vehicle market would rise to 40 million in 2020, from about 17 million this year.
By comparison, the American market leveled off at 16 million to 17 million in its best years before the current economic downturn and is on track for closer to 12 million this year, said Yale Zhang, a vehicle market forecaster in Shanghai, who added that he expected the market in China to be closer to 30 million in 2020.
Wow, 30 to 40 million (!) cars sold in China every year by 2020, and electric cars still a ways off.
8 comments:
It is truely remarkable the breakneck pace of China's industrial development. China's consumption of cars was barely a million units at the turn of the century. 30-40x more in just 20 years. Perhaps we should send John Holdren to speak to their industrial development ministry to tell them about the virtues of de-industrialization.
so roger i'm wondering....
should i think of you as a climate nihilist, a climate defeatist or just a plain ol' contrarian for whom the glass is always half empty?
-2-Marlowe
Indeed, there is a lot about climate policy that can be frustrating or uncomfortable.
If you must assign a label me, you can call me a pragmatist who thinks that problems are best addressed when we fully and accurately understand them.
If you want to read websites that tell you that decarbonizing the economy will be relatively easy and cheap, you can find them. There are even some that will tell you that China is already decarbonizing at a fantastically fast rate. Since the IPCC is among those who have advanced this fantasy I think that it is important to focus on what is actually happening in the real world, lest we adopt policies that are not up to the task.
(see, for instance:
http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/admin/publication_files/resource-2593-2008.08.pdf)
In my view unless one has a fierce optimistic streak, real-world policy analysis might be pretty difficult!
On the subject of Chinese transportation growth, Stuart Staniford posted a very interesting set of graphs a few months back: http://earlywarn.blogspot.com/2010/01/chinese-transportation-growth.html
You might also find much of the graphing work he does of interest.
George Monbiot and Naomi Klein must be thrilled they dumped the anti globalisation movement for carbon trading. Smart move guys !
Seriously, the anti globalisationists have switched to global warming Maybe they are just angry people who need something to complain about.
Are Chinese pollution standards like American ones ? No. Will the Chinese ever seriously try to reduce CO2 ? Not until they are as wealthy as the first world.
It will be interesting (and scary!) to see what actually happens in China as the population ages, especially with the imbalance of men and women.
While there's obviously a lot of potential for growth there, so many forecasts seem to simply draw straight lines from current trends.
Perhaps it is time to look at cleaning up the sources of energy and to stop obsessing about the carbon nature of them. The narrow artificial and impractical ruling by the USSC is not worth discussing.
As development progresses in China there is a potential for a ~5x increase in CO2 emissions. This will come from automotive and electricity generation and be aggravated by coal to oil plants. This makes all western CO2 control efforts irrelevant and stupid. Further, the Chinese government statements about this should be totally ignored. It is a mistake to think that they are organized and making intelligent plans for the future. Further they have no incentive to tell the truth about anything since lies have worked well for them since the time of Mao.
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