Event Summary
There are now only four million passenger cars in China, compared with 140 million in the United States. What if China had as many cars per person as there are in the U.S.? Without preventive policies, 650 million Chinese cars would cause China''s oil consumption to soar to 32.4 million barrels per day (three times current total U.S. imports), urban air pollution to dramatically worsen, and greenhouse gas emissions to rise sharply. Already, China is a net oil importer and home to seven of the ten most polluted cities in the world.
In anticipation of this problem, BCSIA''s Energy Technology Innovation Project with support from the Energy, Heinz, Packard, and Winslow Foundations sponsored a workshop with China''s Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST) in April. Xu Jing, Director of Energy and Transportation at MOST, led the Chinese delegation that included Wan Gang, director of MOST''s new advanced vehicles program, and experts from private companies and the China Automotive Research and Technology Center.
BCSIA scholars John Holdren, Vicki Norberg-Bohm, Kelly Sims Gallagher, Jimin Zhao, Henry Lee, Robert Frosch and Philip Sharp participated, as did Alan Altshuler (Kennedy School), Elizabeth Drake (MIT), David Greene (Oak Ridge), Michael Walsh (former EPA), Bill Moomaw (Tufts), and Ed Wall (Director of FreedomCAR).
At the end of the workshop, a joint work plan for cooperative research on clean vehicle development and deployment was negotiated. In June, Zhao and Gallagher will leave for China to initiate the next phase of the research project.
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