Over the past few months I’ve showed that several of China’s environmental achievements have been little more than smoke and mirrors. So I’m very pleased to announce that Beijing is finally getting it right by creating the right incentives along with policies that are easy to enforce and hard to cheat. Their goal is 100,000 electric cars in the next 5 years, and that makes it our news story of the week.
Electric cars will not be subject to any of the traffic limits Beijing has been putting in place, which means for hundreds of thousands of consumers, these cars will be their only option. This in turn will start to create a critical mass of consumers demanding electric cars which will push development of these technologies.
On top of this already brilliant plan, Beijing has announced the construction of 30 charging stations for electric vehicles. I often scoff when the government makes these pronouncements, but one thing we’ve all seen over this last decade is that China loves building infrastructure, and rarely fails in these kinds of endeavors.
This may be the start of something really big…
Good news for once! I must admit that reading all your posts and the very pertinent comments posted to them has opened my eyes to the real China. I feel a real ambivalence towards China. I am trying to remember the things I like so much about China but the bottom line is, I am very grateful for your wonderfully informative Blog, Tom. Please continue your excellent communications.
Kudos to those guys for setting goals that will reduce dependence on petroleum products and reduce pollution. Of course the job creation all of this will bring won’t be bad, either.
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Oh man I hope this works out the way it should. Beijing’s air is getting worse and worse. Of course they’ll probably use coal-fired plants to provide the energy for the charging stations…
What do you mean Beijing’s air is getting worse? People’s Daily told me that it was getting better. Hard to imagine that the gov’t would lie about such a thing 😀