Transportation

Environmental news in China has seen some real highs and lows of late, ranging from the opening of the Beijing-Shanghai high-speed rail to a severe oil spill.

Beijing-Shanghai High-Speed Rail a Sell-Out

Trains began running on the new high-speed line between Beijing and Shanghai on June 30. Formerly a trip that could take over 12 hours, the new trains can make the 820 mile journey in less than 5. In contrast, a trip of equivalent distance from Washington, DC to Orlando by train takes over 16 hours.

Recent weeks have seen a spate of announcements concerning environmental harms ranging from those stemming from the Three Gorges Dam, the world’s largest hydropower project, to heavy metal pollution and increasingly vigorous enforcement actions by China’s Environmental Ministry.

Lawrence Berkeley National Lab researchers present new “bottom up” data

A group at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, including ChinaFAQs Network Experts,¹ has come out with a new and much more detailed projection of China’s energy use and greenhouse gas emissions through 2050. The result of this more intensive, “bottom up” analysis is good news for global energy security and the climate. The group’s projection suggests that Chinese energy use could actually plateau before 2050 and greenhouse emissions could peak between 2025 and 2030.

The draft of China’s much-anticipated 12th Five-Year Plan was released this Saturday, March 5 at the opening session of the National People’s Congress (NPC). The Plan will actually be brought to a vote at the close of the session later this week. While there may be some changes to the Plan, in past years these have not been large.

Faced with a rapidly urbanizing population, China’s central government has set out to boost mass transit use in its largest cities to 60% from the current 35%. Yet with forecasts of up to 250 million cars on its roadways by 2025, China must seek innovative ways to tackle that goal. The recent success of the southern city of Guangzhou’s bus rapid transit system may provide part of the answer.

One present Santa may have brought a lot of Chinese families this year: a small car. On [December 28th], the Chinese government announced a 10 percent sales tax on small cars effective January 1, sending many who had planned to purchase private vehicles in a dash to meet the year-end deadline.

President Hu Jintao concluded his visit to the United States Friday, after meeting with President Obama and other top government and business leaders in Washington, D.C., and Chicago. Among the many issues on the agenda for these two leaders, strengthening cooperation on climate change and clean energy is an area where real progress is being made.

China and the U.S. issued a joint statement Wednesday, January 19, covering the range of issues discussed during President Hu Jintao’s state visit to Washington this week. The White House also posted a fact sheet summarizing Hu and Obama’s agreement to enhance cooperation on climate change, clean energy, and the environment. The Department of Energy provides further detail on these Clean Energy Cooperation Announcements.

On January 18, at a ceremony at the US-China Strategic Forum on Clean Energy Cooperation in Washington, D.C., U.S. Department of Energy Secretary Steven Chu and China’s Energy Minister Zhang Guogao and Science and Technology Minister Wan Gang signed an agreement to advance the US-China Clean Energy Research Center (CERC).

On January 18, 2011, the Department of Energy released a report detailing the substantial progress made to date on a number of clean energy initiatives between China and the United States.

To download the report, click here