[WildRose]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('americandream', 'T')hey've only just abandoned the bike! 30 years ago, Beijing was notorious for its bike jams. Google it.

[americandream]

Obviously cars are appealing. Advertisers are selling the dream to the poor sods, aren't they?

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('WildRose', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('americandream', 'T')hey've only just abandoned the bike! 30 years ago, Beijing was notorious for its bike jams. Google it.

[Bas]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'C')hina has just rolled its 10-millionth car off the assembly line. Scott Tong reports the country is currently king of the auto industry. Before today, only Japan and the U.S. assembled 10 million vehicles in a single year. China did it in just over 9 months. By contrast, U.S. auto plants this year have cranked out just 4 million units.

China, in fact, is tops in two categories: world's top producer and consumer this year, thanks to government incentives. Those will end, just as Cash for Clunkers did. But analyst Jerry Huang at CSM Worldwide doesn't see the China's car market breaking down.

Jerry Huang: Customers in mid-size cars or SUVs, they don't care about the government incentive or subsidy. So there are still plenty of customers in China which will buy their cars next year.

Top sellers in China are Hyundai, Nissan and Volkswagen, along with Chinese brand BYD. Huang says China's emerging consumers are just now trading up and replacing their first cars. Which gives rise to a brand new job description in China: the used-car salesman.

[Bas]

Sorry SG, hadn't seen your thread. Anyway, did someone say gas consumption in China is down? Actually it's up.

[mos6507]

I thought China making EVs means "bye bye peak oil"?

[americandream]

Strange that innit! You add 1 billion additional pigs to the trough and your purchase of swill drops

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('mos6507', 'I') thought China making EVs means "bye bye peak oil"?

[EdwinSm]

This idea might help with air pollution, but will it have much effect on oil use?

Will people rush out to buy new cars? This seems a good deal for car makers!

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'C')hina plans to remove six million vehicles that do not meet exhaust emission standards by the end of the year as a way of improving air quality.

More than 300,000 vehicles will be decommissioned in the capital Beijing.

Recent findings from the state's environmental agency showed that 31% of the air pollution in Beijing comes from vehicle exhaust fumes.

Next year, the government plans to scrap up to five million vehicles from other regions.
......

[peterjames]

They are going to put an extra 20 million odd cars on the road this year, and another 20 million next year. In addition, they will add over 350 coal fired power stations of the next few years, and the population is going up 30 million or so. These 6 million cars they are taking off the road (and they probably wont amount to anything more than motorised rickshaws), will need to be burning tar sands for their elimination to make any difference.

[vtsnowedin]

An older worn out old car probably puts out more pollution then ten new ones so getting rid of them certainly will do no harm and they might achieve a solid plus in air quality. Imagine what the US would be like if we were still running cars on leaded gas.

[FoxV]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('vtsnowedin', 'A')n older worn out old car probably puts out more pollution then ten new ones so getting rid of them certainly will do no harm and they might achieve a solid plus in air quality. Imagine what the US would be like if we were still running cars on leaded gas.

[jedrider]

Anyone familiar with LA air pollution will understand perfectly how big a difference having stricter vehicle air pollution standards can make as there are more cars being driven in LA than 35 years ago and the air is cleaner or, at least, no longer has that brown gunky color known as smog.

[BobInget]

Air quality in China's big cities has reached critical mass.

Regional and global impacts of Asian pollution

In the last 30 years, with a quasi-exponential growth in industrialization, population, and urbanization, many Asian countries have experienced deteriorating air quality and a dramatic increase in anthropogenic emissions of aerosol in the atmosphere. Enormous manufacturing, industrial, and power plants, as well as automobiles, have produced huge amounts of air pollutants.

China, for instance, has experienced severe air pollution, with aerosols or fine particulate matter smaller than 2.5 micrometers (PM2.5) reaching unprecedented high levels across many cities in recent winters. Measurements in Beijing showed that levels of PM2.5 were about 350 to 500 μg/m3, which are more than 10 times higher than the 25 μg/m3 that the World Health Organization considers safe.

In January 2014, China experienced record levels of pollution several times, even exceeding the maximum that the U.S. Embassy’s equipment can measure. Because of the ever-growing air pollution in China, in the last three decades, the nationwide number of deaths from lung cancer has risen by about 465 percent.

Man-made aerosols are also linked to the modification of weather and climate. Our previous studies have shown that air pollution in China can reduce the surface temperature by scattering or absorbing the solar radiation aloft, and can suppress light precipitation and enhance extreme heavy rain by modulating cloud systems. Air pollution is also found to increase the frequency of lightning associated with thunderstorms.

While these results indicate that man-made aerosols strongly contribute to extreme weather near the emission source, a more critical question is about the far-reaching effects of Asian pollution.

Under the influence of the wintertime monsoon flow from Asia to the Pacific Ocean, huge amounts of man-made aerosols from Asia, mainly composed of sulfate and black carbon, can be lifted a few miles high and transported downwind to the northern Pacific Ocean and even North America.

Using global climate models and observational data, our recent study suggests that Asian pollutants can significantly affect cloud formations, precipitation, and the intensity of storms over the northern Pacific Ocean. These findings explain the increase in wintertime convective clouds that researchers have observed in this region (using satellite measurements) since the 1990s.

Since the mid-latitude storm is critical to the global general circulation that transports heat and moisture from low latitudes to the polar regions, we can expect that the storms modulated by Asian pollution will affect the weather in the Northern Hemisphere. Inter-governmental agencies should use the quantitative predictions of the far-reaching effects of Asian pollution when developing strategies to mitigate the regional and global impacts of anthropogenic pollutants.

– written by Yuan Wang, provided to BBJ by The Mark News

Yuan Wang is currently a researcher in the Jet Propulsion Lab at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).

[Keith_McClary]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('jedrider', 'A')nyone familiar with LA air pollution will understand perfectly how big a difference having stricter vehicle air pollution standards can make as there are more cars being driven in LA than 35 years ago and the air is cleaner or, at least, no longer has that brown gunky color known as smog.

[Surf]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'j')edrider wrote:
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'A')nyone familiar with LA air pollution will understand perfectly how big a difference having stricter vehicle air pollution standards can make as there are more cars being driven in LA than 35 years ago and the air is cleaner or, at least, no longer has that brown gunky color known as smog.

[SILENTTODD]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'j')edrider wrote:
Anyone familiar with LA air pollution will understand perfectly how big a difference having stricter vehicle air pollution standards can make as there are more cars being driven in LA than 35 years ago and the air is cleaner or, at least, no longer has that brown gunky color known as smog.
A few years ago I read that in LA they could place detectors by the freeways and see the spike in emissions when old beaters went by. But there was no legal requirement to get rid of them. Is it still the same?

[KaiserJeep]

Vehicles built in 1975 or older are exempt from smog test requirements in California. It's actually a pretty good policy, because only restored or customized classic cars and trucks are still around and driveable by then, and such cars get very few miles driven, while tending to be finely tuned. Nobody drives a polluting clunker that old every day except for undocumented immigrants, and it is not PC to arrest them or get upset if they have no plates, no insurance, and no smog certificate.

[ralfy]

Also, the scrapped cars might be sold to developing economies.

[SILENTTODD]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', ' ')Kaiser Jeep wrote"
Nobody drives a polluting clunker that old every day except for undocumented immigrants, and it is not PC to arrest them or get upset if they have no plates, no insurance, and no smog certificate.

[DesuMaiden]

There ain't enough oil in the world for more cars in China. Watch this youtube video where the Chinese are driving cars.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTKRk4EEhYM

There is no way in hell they even sustain an automobile fleet the size of the USA's. That's because there ain't enough space in a country as overpopulated as China. China has 1.3 billion people. There is no way they have as many cars per capita as the USA. Not by a long shot.

There is NO way in hell there is enough oil the world for more Chinese cars. It takes an uncounted number of barrels to produce a car (by all estimates about 27 to 54 barrels of oil to manufacture a car). And a car will use an incredible amount of oil in its life-time. If China had as many cars as the USA per capita, it would require 7 oil fields the size of the ones in Saudi Arabia to meet that kind of demand for oil.

I'm visiting China next tuesday. I can't imagine how crowded and chaotic the roads would be with all of those cars on it. I just hope I don't get run over by any cars, lol.

[MD]

Yep it has been amazing to watch that develop over the last decade or two. China has allegedly leap-frogged the west in certain areas, but in this regard I think they missed a real opportunity.