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Monday, July 5, 2010

China n Cars!!!


The automobile market in China is expanding at breakneck speed. Factories are churning out cars 24/7 but still unable to meet the Chinese demand. China overtook the U.S. last year as the world’s largest automobile market with sales surging 46 percent to 13.6 million, according to the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers. Nissan, Ford Motor Co. and Honda Motor Co. are running their Chinese factories at full capacity, with overtime and weekend shifts, and still can’t deliver enough cars. Cars are no longer a luxury item, but more of a basic necessity. Although China has made significant investment in infrastructure, more needs to be done to support the booming car market and to aviod huge traffic jams like the one above. Cars have not only affected the domestic landscape they are changing China’s role in the world. Increased resource requirements have led Chinese companies to scour the globe for commodities, no matter the ecological costs. Two weeks ago, for instance, a Chinese company bought a $4.6 billion stake in Alberta’s Tar Sands, which is among the world’s dirtiest sources of oil.
Until the mid-1990s China was oil self-sufficient, a position that has changed dramatically. China is now the number two consumer of oil worldwide and the country has been responsible for a great deal of the world’s total oil growth in recent years. With less than two percent of the world’s oil reserves, most of its growing needs will be imported. Fifteen years ago automobiles in China guzzled about 10 percent of the country’s much smaller total oil usage. Today cars and light trucks consume about forty percent of all China’s oil. So long as the country continues along the North American ‘development’ path, there’s no reason to believe that cars won’t someday consume half of the country’s oil. The ecological consequences will become increasingly severe. Is this really the development we need?