According to Yahoo!News :
(Kyodo) _ China last year missed a voluntary target to improve energy efficiency, a key policy in the country’s efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and tackle global warming, state media reported Wednesday.
China set itself the task of improving energy efficiency — the amount of energy required to produce one unit of gross domestic product — by 4 percent last year, but it managed an improvement of just 1.23 percent, according to Xinhua News Agency.
And figures released by the National Bureau of Statistics show that overall energy consumption rose sharply in 2006, with the consumption of coal — which supplies most of China’s energy needs — up by 9.6 percent last year to 2.37 billion tons, Xinhua said.
Crude oil consumption was up by 7.1 percent and natural gas use increased by 19.9 percent, statistics show.
Although China is not obliged by international agreements to reduce the amount of greenhouse gases it pumps into the atmosphere, it has pledged to improve energy efficiency by a total of 20 percent over the current five-year plan period, which runs until 2010.
Despite the failure to meet its target for last year, Yang Fuqiang, vice president of the U.S.-based Energy Foundation, said it is too early to say whether or not the overall target is achievable because the policy was introduced only in the middle of last year.
Because this kind of policy needs time to implement, he said, this year and next will be the key years. China must be on track to improve energy efficiency by then or the policy “definitely fails,” added Yang.
Earlier this month, China admitted the country is being affected by global warming — with higher air temperatures and more natural disasters — and promised to cut greenhouse gas emissions that cause the phenomenon.
- China is going to tackle the global warming effects….We should also DO THE SAME!
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