Photo: Kandi Electric Vehicles
As if the world doesn’t have any other problems, the air quality in China has been a very talked-about subject lately, interrupted only by the similar problems India is facing.
But having cities with more inhabitants than most European countries tends to grab the world’s attention, especially since the COP21 meeting in France has just ended, so pollution was high on everybody’s agenda in recent days.
The most important thing is that China itself seems to become more and more aware that if it goes on without taking any kind of measures, it will soon be sitting under a cloud of its own smoke, with its citizens taking turns to look at the sun and a blue sky through some very long periscopes.
But the first signs of real action taken by the authorities are beginning to show, so after they reduced industrial activity as well as traffic around Beijing for a few days and began to shame private polluters on China’s version of Facebook, another city is making a move towards clearer skies.
We’re talking about Tianjin, ranked fourth in size in China after Shanghai, Beijing and Guangzhou, but that still means it’s home to 15 million residents. Inevitably, that’s another way of saying that air quality is an issue here as well, even if not at the same level as in Beijing.
One of the two leading Chinese companies in electric car development, Kandi Electric Vehicles, is launching a pilot car-sharing program that will use 1,000 of the firm’s tiny zero-emission cars. The vehicles are suitable for urban driving and are aimed to reduce the number of people who feel the need to buy their own cars, which despite China’s growing EV market, are still dominantly conventionally-powered ones.
However, the EV segment is seeing a rapid growth in China, with sales rising by 290 percent year-to-year over the first ten months of 2015. According to thetoggle website, the Chinese EV market is expected to topple the one in the US by the end of this year.
But even though that’s great news, it won’t do much to solve China’s problems. It shows a significant change of mind within the Chinese population, but as long as the country continues to be so dependent on coal power plants, electric vehicles are just a way of moving pollution from the car’s tailpipes to the plant’s huge furnaces.
The most important thing is that China itself seems to become more and more aware that if it goes on without taking any kind of measures, it will soon be sitting under a cloud of its own smoke, with its citizens taking turns to look at the sun and a blue sky through some very long periscopes.
But the first signs of real action taken by the authorities are beginning to show, so after they reduced industrial activity as well as traffic around Beijing for a few days and began to shame private polluters on China’s version of Facebook, another city is making a move towards clearer skies.
We’re talking about Tianjin, ranked fourth in size in China after Shanghai, Beijing and Guangzhou, but that still means it’s home to 15 million residents. Inevitably, that’s another way of saying that air quality is an issue here as well, even if not at the same level as in Beijing.
One of the two leading Chinese companies in electric car development, Kandi Electric Vehicles, is launching a pilot car-sharing program that will use 1,000 of the firm’s tiny zero-emission cars. The vehicles are suitable for urban driving and are aimed to reduce the number of people who feel the need to buy their own cars, which despite China’s growing EV market, are still dominantly conventionally-powered ones.
However, the EV segment is seeing a rapid growth in China, with sales rising by 290 percent year-to-year over the first ten months of 2015. According to thetoggle website, the Chinese EV market is expected to topple the one in the US by the end of this year.
But even though that’s great news, it won’t do much to solve China’s problems. It shows a significant change of mind within the Chinese population, but as long as the country continues to be so dependent on coal power plants, electric vehicles are just a way of moving pollution from the car’s tailpipes to the plant’s huge furnaces.
Google News