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China has the world's most aggressive electric car goals. Communist leaders are promoting them to clean up smog-choked cities and in hopes of taking the lead in an emerging technology.
At the auto show, the global industry's biggest marketing event of the year, almost every global and Chinese auto brand is showing at least one electric concept vehicle, if not a market-ready model.
Heizmann said VW, which vies with GM for the title of China's top-selling automaker, expects annual sales of at least 400,000 "new energy vehicles" – the government's term for electric or gasoline-electric hybrids – by 2020 and 1.5 million by 2025.
The vast majority of Chinese get around by smog-free vehicles already. They're called bicycles.
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Volkswagen to Roll Out an Electric Car in China. Can It Help Reduce the Smog?
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There *__is* intelligent life on Earth, but I leave for Texas on Monday.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Friday April 28 2017, @01:40PM (1 child)
" There are two reasons that corporations have off-shored so much of American industry. One, is labor cost, and two, is lack of regulations."
You seemed to have skipped over those last three words. There are few if any regulations on the coal plants. Coal can be much cleaner than it is, if the plants are properly regulated. Smog isn't a foregone conclusion if you're running coal plants.
(Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Friday April 28 2017, @02:26PM
Still not seeing it. If a coal plant is made cleaner, the vehicle then is getting energy from a cleaner plant. I accounted for this: I specifically said that electric vehicles are source-agnostic. Don't know, don't care. If the source gets cleaner, it is a win. Doesn't matter what the source is. I didn't say coal couldn't be made cleaner, either. Sure it can. I'm right with you there. There are numerous forks in these paths. Not all of them are bad.
The root issue here is that the drive towards cleaner energy sources and cleaner energy consumption needs to be undertaken. China's doing that in various ways, including a very strong push to solar. I'm willing to say that's entirely a good thing. No matter how they do it. We're stumbling in the US right now, due to a prevalence of environmental know-nothings in our government, but that pendulum, too, will probably swing back. Although I find it actually painful to contemplate the backwards steps into increased pollution currently being encouraged by the Trump administration. I simply despise that man and his cadre of sycophantic morons. Sigh.
As far as US corporations moving their entire operations offshore, yes, absolutely – lack of regulations is a huge factor. However, our government, again, is dysfunctional in exerting any control over such transfers of industry, basically turning a blind eye to it, so we're pretty much screwed there, too. China, on the other hand, is very strict about who can import what, which means that should an operation move out of China, it's not a given that it's going to be able to sell stuff back into the country. We have huge trouble selling into China, and we're one of its biggest trading partners in the China-to-US direction.
As far as power production itself goes, US corporations have not off-shored power production much (a little bit to Canada.) It's just not practical, because no one can get the power from distant locations to here in any practical way at this point in time. So foreign regulations on coal plants have little or nothing to do with our corporate power supply structures. Chinese coal plants do what they're told. So that's down to a question of what they're going to get told. US coal plants are dying on the vine because of stiff competition; they won't be a significant factor for much longer. Though I'm all for them (and everything else) being regulated right down to zero CO2 and zero particulates. Which means 100% transition to nuclear, solar, wind, geothermal, tidal, hydro, etc.