Beijing: China may not meet an energy efficiency target set for this year because its efforts to revive its economy in the wake of a global slump have set back several years of progress on reducing its energy usage, a senior Chinese official said yesterday.
The economic giant is focused on clean energy innovation, such as producing alternative-fuel cars, to reduce its greenhouse emissions, but a booming economy has made China's goal of cutting its energy intensity by 20 per cent over a five-year period that ends this year uncertain, said Vice Minister of Science and Technology Zhang Laiwu.
Arduous tasks
"We still have a lot of challenges to meet. We should not be too optimistic about that. Our task remains arduous," Zhang told a news conference.
The government plan suffered a setback this year as China sought to jump-start its stalling economy with a stimulus that focused heavily on upgrading infrastructure, sparking a construction boom that boosted demand for steel, cement and other energy-intensive products. China had cut energy intensity by 14.4 per cent in 2009, but the country's economic rebound pushed energy intensity back up by 0.09 per cent in the first half of this year, the first such increase since 2006.
China has surpassed the United States as the world's largest producer of greenhouse gases.
