China may take hybrid lead
American consumers looking for inexpensive hybrid vehicles might soon be buying cars made in China. Although there hasn't been any formal announcement about hybrid production there, it seems inevitable that China will become a major hybrid producer.
China's major cities have the worst pollution outside of Mexico City. Chinese hybrid buses are being produced now, using technology from UQM Technologies,Toyota has an auto plant in China, and ZAP's new electric vehicles are being made in China.
Costs of labor and parts in China are a fraction of what they are in the U.S. or Japan, and the industry is ramping up as the nation is now the third largest producer of autos.
This week China is starting to crash-test its vehicles using the international NCAP standards, so shipping products around the globe may not require major modifications to the bodies.
China facing extreme weather
BEIJING, China (Reuters) -- Storms, floods, heat and drought that have killed more than 2,000 people in China this year are a prelude to weather patterns likely to become more extreme due to global warming, the head of the Beijing Climate Center said.
China was braced for further hardship as rising temperatures worldwide trigger increasingly extreme weather, Dong Wenjie, director-general of the climate center, said.
"The precise causes of these phenomena aren't easy to determine on their own," Dong told Reuters of meteorological disasters that have caused 160 billion yuan ($20 billion) worth of damage this year.
"But we know the broad background is global warming. That's clear. It's a reminder that global warming will bring about increasingly extreme weather events more often."
A study issued by China's chief climate scientists last year predicted that mean temperatures across China were likely to climb, forcing major changes in rainfall, desertification, river flows and crop production.
Yet even as China approaches the United States as the world's largest producer of the manmade greenhouse gases that trap heat in the atmosphere, Beijing is set against mandatory ceilings on its emissions, experts said.
"China's preoccupation is economic development and growth," said Paul Harris, of Lingnan University in Hong Kong, who studies climate change policy.
"It seems Chinese policy-makers are beginning to take warnings about global warming on board. But they certainly don't want to sign on to compulsory caps."
Global warming may increase rainfall in China's north, but increased temperatures and evaporation there are likely to offset much or all of that, Lin Erda, a climate expert at the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, told Reuters.
Without corrective action, nationwide agricultural production was likely to fall between 5 and 10 percent, he said.
With its vast and arid western half, China is no stranger to drought. But, unusually, this year's extreme heat and dry had struck the geographical basin enclosing Sichuan province and Chongqing municipality, said Dong.
Until now, that area has experienced a slight fall in average temperatures during past decades, possibly thanks to a protective umbrella of pollution or cloud.
But this year much of Sichuan and Chongqing has suffered record-breaking hot days and the lowest rainfall for nearly 60 years, and on Sunday Sichuan forecast another burst of 38 degrees Celsius (100 degree Fahrenheit) days and withering drought.
Whether this shift was a one-off or augured a long-term change remained to be seen, said Dong. Part of the explanation appeared to lie in shrinking snow cover on the neighboring Tibet-Qinghai plateau, he said.
But even as China feels the effects of global warming, it is unwilling to cap its greenhouse gas emissions, saying responsibility for tackling global warmings lies with developed countries that are -- per capita -- still much bigger polluters.
China is a signatory to the Kyoto Protocol, the international treaty intended to rein in greenhouse gas emissions. But as a developing country, China is exempt, for now, from the limits on greenhouse emissions that wealthy countries are supposed to abide by.
"We're willing to limit and transform industry and our energy structure by ourselves," Dong said.
"But as a matter of fairness, it has to be voluntary, not mandatory, because we're a developing country."
Dog's driving lesson ends in crash
BEIJING, China (AP) -- You can teach a dog new tricks -- but driving isn't one of them.
A woman in Hohhot, the capital of north China's Inner Mongolia region, crashed her car while giving her dog a driving lesson, the official Xinhua News Agency reported Monday.
No injuries were reported although the vehicles involved were slightly damaged, Xinhua said.
The woman, identified only by her surname, Li, said her dog "was fond of crouching on the steering wheel and often watched her drive."
"She thought she would let the dog 'have a try' while she operated the accelerator and brake," the report said. "They did not make it far before crashing into an oncoming car."
Xinhua did not say what kind of dog or vehicles were involved but Li paid for repairs.
Panda, man exchange bites
BEIJING, China (AP) -- A drunken Chinese tourist bit a panda at the Beijing Zoo after the animal attacked him when he jumped into the enclosure and tried to hug it according to state media.
Zhang Xinyan had drunk four pitchers of beer at a restaurant before "stumbling to the zoo" nearby and stopping off at the pen holding a sleeping 6-year-old male panda, Gu Gu, on Tuesday, the Beijing Morning Post said.
"He felt a sudden urge to touch the panda with his hand" and jumped over a waist-high railing down into the enclosure, the newspaper said. "When he got closer and was undiscovered, he reached out to hug it."
Startled, Gu Gu bit Zhang in the right leg, it said. Zhang, a 35-year-old migrant laborer from central Henan province, got angry and kicked the panda, who then bit his other leg. A tussle ensued, the paper said.
"I bit the fellow in the back," Zhang was quoted as saying in the newspaper. "Its skin was quite thick."
Other tourists yelled for a zookeeper, who soon got the panda under control by spraying it with water, reports said. Zhang was hospitalized.
Newspaper photographs showed Zhang lying on a hospital bed with blood-soaked bandages and several seams of stitches running down his leg.
The Beijing Youth Daily quoted Zhang, a father of two who was visiting Beijing for the first time, as saying that he had seen pandas on television and "they seemed to get along well with people."
"No one ever said they would bite people," Zhang said. "I just wanted to touch it. I was so dizzy from the beer. I don't remember much."
Ye Mingxia, a spokeswoman for the Beijing Zoo, confirmed the incident happened but would not give any details. She said Gu Gu was "healthy and uninjured."
"We're not considering punishing him now," Ye said in a telephone interview. "He's suffered quite a bit of shock."
China has more than 180 pandas living in captivity. A 2002 government census found there were just 1,596 pandas left in the wild.
But state media has said a new study by Chinese and British scientists has found there might be as many as 3,000.
In 2003, a college student trying to take a photo of a panda in the Beijing Zoo jumped into the enclosure and broke his bones in the fall, the Beijing Morning Post said.
It did not say which panda it was or if it attacked the student.
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