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Saturday, Jul 11, 2009
While the U.S. sells out its own environment to the highest bidder, China is getting serious about energy conservation. Two scientists explain how and why.
Nov 20, 2003 | In just a few years, new cars in China, a developing nation that is not renowned for being a paragon of environmental virtue, will be required to be more fuel efficient than automobiles in the United States.
According to a story published in the New York Times on Tuesday, China plans to regulate fuel-economy standards for the first time, and the rules that it's imposing will be "significantly more stringent" than American standards. By 2005, says the report, new cars, vans and sport utility vehicles in China will be required to get about two miles better gas mileage than in the U.S., and five miles more a gallon by 2008.
The news came just as the U.S. House of Representatives sent the country's most sweeping energy bill since 1992 to the Senate, a bill which environmental groups blasted as a huge giveaway to the oil, coal and nuclear industries, doing little to curb pollution or improve greenhouse gas emissions.
Salon spoke with Jonathan E. Sinton, a staff scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and member of the lab's China Energy Group and his colleague Lynn Price, deputy group leader of the lab's International Energy Studies group, to learn more about why the world's No. 2 emitter of greenhouse gases is taking this step.
What are the implications of China's move to regulate fuel-economy standards?
JS: One of the things that's driving it is a desire on the part of the Chinese to acquire technologies from foreign automakers to allow them to accelerate the introduction of more fuel-efficient vehicles.
In the past, when China first started collaborating with foreign manufacturers, including Japanese, European and U.S. ones, they often brought in inferior technologies that were no longer being used in those countries.
So, it's an attempt to try to get first-rate, cutting-edge technologies into China?
JS: Right -- to get a bit of leapfrogging going. In all areas of international collaboration with industry, China has always sought to pressure foreign collaborators to bring in the best of their technology.
Often, that's been resisted in part because of the difficulty of recouping costs in any sort of meaningful way in China, usually for pretty solid business reasons. Certainly, the protection of intellectual property in China is not known for being the top of the list.
So, this is clearly going to have an impact on foreign auto manufacturers. And it's going to cause some consolidation in the Chinese auto industry. The same thing happened with appliance efficiency standards.
Do you think that since China is such a large market this will have an effect on the cars that the rest of the world buys?
JS: China is a fairly self-contained market in that it is not exporting a lot of cars out of the region yet. It may eventually, but it isn't right now. So, it's not likely to immediately cause other countries to adopt efficiency standards.
How dramatic an increase has there been in people buying cars in China, and the emissions that produces?
JS: Double-digits for the past few years. Motor vehicle output has been rising extremely fast.
One of the reasons that it's been rising very fast is that China's been substituting domestically manufactured vehicles for vehicles that would have previously been imported. [There has been] less reliance on imports as it builds up domestic manufacturing capability, and for the past several years vehicle sales have been rising at double-digit rates.
In most major cities, motor vehicles are now probably the No. 1 source of air pollution, whereas in the recent past it was industry.
How recently?
JS: Well, the transition might have taken place five or six years ago or even longer for cities like Guangzhou, and within that time frame for Beijing and Shanghai, as well.
Part of that is the relocation of major industries outside of major city centers to suburbs and countrysides. And part of it is the increasingly stringent emissions standards being applied to the industrial facilities that remain in cities. And part of that is the increase in motor-vehicles population.
LP: If you have a picture of major cities in China filled with bicycles, it's an outdated picture in your mind. They're filled with cars, and they're filled with traffic jams. And it takes an hour to get to meetings in taxis.
