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Chinese Officials Judged on Energy Efficiency |
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| CHINA: June 20, 2006 | ||
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BEIJING - Chinese officials, for decades expected to foster economic growth at almost any cost, will now have to weigh up the amount of energy their firms are burning, the official Xinhua news agency reported.
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Zhejiang, a province on the booming east coast, has added energy efficiency to the criteria used to evaluate local officials' performance and decide their future career prospects, the report said. Worried about growing dependence on imported oil and the environmental toll of dirty-burning coal, Beijing has launched an energy saving drive that aims to cut the amount of energy used to generate each unit of national income 20 percent by 2010. Vice-Premier Zeng Peiyan has called for a nationwide appraisal system to include energy efficiency. At present the country's financial hub, Shanghai, uses it as a performance criteria, as do Jiangsu, Shandong, Hebei and Gansu provinces. In Zhejiang nearly 70 top officials have been given responsibility for energy-saving, which leaders hope will reduce firms' costs, promote innovation and protect China's battered environment, Xinhua quoted governor Lu Zushan saying. Between 2001 and 2005, energy consumption growth outstripped overall economic expansion by 6 percentage points, while the amount of power used to generate each unit of output in China is 3.4 times of the world's average, Xinhua said.
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REUTERS NEWS SERVICE
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