Beijing’s authorities ordered limits on cars, factories and construction sites during a for smog from Tuesday through midday Thursday.
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Even if drivers switch to electric vehicles, it may not alleviate the pollution threat – assuming the cars are recharged using electricity generated by coal-burning power plants.
Li also said law enforcement of rules aimed at cutting pollution, such as suspending work at polluting businesses, should be improved.
Regardless of the electric vehicle market’s potential, Peter Ford, The Christian Science Monitor’s Beijing correspondent, describes the blinding pollution as an immediate threat. “You can smell a bad air day here the moment you wake up”.
The red alert was carried out as the highest warning of its kind from a four color warning system, when heavy smog covered the entire city for the second time around, lingering for many weeks to come.
Those subsidies and other government measures have helped pure-electric auto sales soar nearly fivefold to 113,810 nationally in first 10 months of the year, placing China on course to overtake the United States as the biggest marketplace for electric cars this year. Levels of PM 2.5, considered the most hazardous, crossed 600 units in Beijing, almost 25 times the acceptable standard set by the World Health Organization.
Did any of this news resonate with the Paris Climate Change Conference taking place the same week? Both contributions aim to support existing clean air legislation in the Hebei that consumes most of the coal in China.
“Even though EV adoption in China might increase local emissions”, the experts explain, “global emissions from automobiles could nevertheless plausibly decrease as a result of increased development and adoption of EV technology worldwide”.
A recent study by Carnegie Mellon University found that a shift to electric cars in China might cause more air pollution because of the nation’s emissions-intensive electricity grid.
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“Recently, the smog is so serious that people aren’t willing to go outside, so they call us to ask”, Li Hui, owner of several BYD dealerships, told Reuters.
