BEIJING: Despite the significant progress China has made in energy conservation, an expert has called for even greater endeavors toward major climate action, considering its comparatively low cost in reducing carbon emissions.
China’s energy intensity－energy consumption per unit of GDP－is now about 1.7 times the global average, meaning that there is huge potential in promoting energy conservation, Fu Chengyu, former chairman of China’s largest oil refiner Sinopec, said on Wednesday at the Fourth Future Energy Convention in Beijing.
The low energy conservation standards in many industrial sectors are to blame for the low efficiency, he said. Many of them were introduced in the 1980s and 1990s by some already defunct government bodies. Though many enterprises are able to meet the standards, their energy consumption and emissions remain comparatively high. “It’s unreasonable to see such low energy efficiency in such a major economy,” he said, adding that intensifying the efficiency is the most realistic and feasible solution to reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the country’s manufacturing and traditional industries. Both technology upgrades and tailored institutional reforms are needed to address the problem, he noted.
–The Daily Mail-China Daily news exchange item
