Henry Lee of the Harvard Kennedy School reports the Chinese 
government cannot make their people buy electric cars. The American “Green” press insists that China is the leader in green technology and that they want to join in a pact to reduce CO2 emissions. Well if you watch what the Chinese do rather than what they say, you would know they have no intention of cutting back on the use of fossil fuels.
Mr. Lee was the lead author of the report. In the report Mr. Lee says:
“The Chinese government’s goals were to have 500,000 electric vehicles on the road by 2011 (accounting for 5 percent of total vehicle sales) and 5 million on the road by 2020. But, as the authors point out, “in mid-2013, China had only about 40,000 electric vehicles on the road, more than 80 percent of which were in public fleet vehicles, such as taxis and buses.”
“For a country that in the past couple of decades has seemed never to fail to impress the rest of the world with its ability to deliver on bold ambitions, the failure to “turn over” on the electric vehicle policy is worthy of study”.
“To meet its ambitious goals, China (central and local government) initiated subsidies up to $19,600 in some cities and the state-owned grid companies committed to building public charging stations. Despite these subsidies, less than 16,000 electric vehicles and hybrids were sold in 2012 compared to 576,000 in the United States. While China’s program has been primarily driven by a desire to build globally competitive electric vehicles, air pollution, especially in the cities, has become a national imperative. Yet, if coal-fired power is used to meet electric vehicle electricity demand, the absence of tail pipe emissions will likely be entirely offset by incremental power generation.”
China is building new coal-based power stations at an astonishing pace. As noted in the preceding paragraph, the CO2 emissions from those coal based plants that supply the electricity to operate the electric cars exceeds the electric car reduction in CO2 emission.
With regard to technology, Lee’s report say:
“The electric vehicle policy in China, the authors find, faces many of the same technical and economic challenges faced by the rest of the world: high battery costs, long charging times, and no obvious business model for charging infrastructure. “But domestic barriers loom even larger,” they write. “The country has a weak domestic auto sector, counterproductive trade barriers, a balkanized subsidy and infrastructure program, and uncertainty over standards and technology.”
“Joint ventures with foreign automakers have not resulted in the hoped-for transfer of intellectual property and manufacturing know-how, they write. With electric vehicles slated to be a primary conduit for home-grown innovation, the Chinese government restricted imports of these vehicles and demanded more stringent technology transfer from foreign firms — which foreign automakers have so far been unwilling to make.”
We know that much of the Chinese technology comes by way of their hackers stealing US technology. Their new stealth fighter is from stolen American design by those hackers. Maybe the Automobile people provide better protection for their technology database than does our Government.
cbdakota
Climate Change Sanity 