Energy saving to be stressed
(China Daily)
Updated: 2004-09-25 08:46

Soaring oil prices have brought energy saving back to the debating table. The government should highlight energy saving as another state policy, commented an article in the Study Times. An excerpt follows:

Recently, concern increased as international oil prices made daily surges around the globe. China's reaction to the climbing oil price stresses energy saving rather than energy exploitation.

China has experienced a 5.77 per cent average annual increase of oil consumption over the past 10 years. As a result, China has replaced Japan as the second largest oil consuming country in the world.

However, China's oil supply was not taking equally giant leaps forward. The combined effect leads to an increasing demand for imported oil. Economists estimated that if oil per barrel remained priced over US$40, China's GDP growth will suffer a probable drop of 0.7 to 0.8 percentage points.

China will embrace rapid development in the chemical and manufacturing industries, which correspondingly means China will suffer from an ever-widening gap between oil supply and demand. Therefore, China will import more oil, even if the price soars to unaffordable heights.

Further still, energy saving is not topping our power strategy agenda. It should be treated as another basic national policy, with equal importance as family planning and environmental protection.

Every country would like to achieve rapid economic growth with the-lower-the-better energy consumption. However, this will depend largely on the thorough exploration of our potential in energy saving.

To better implement the energy-saving strategy, several problems should be solved beforehand.

Public awareness of energy saving is insufficient. People expect the government and enterprises to shoulder the entire burden of energy saving and refuse to share the load. Therefore, certain measures should be adopted to encourage people to save energy willingly.

Furthermore, the government is not fully involved in an energy saving management system. In China's power management system, a vacancy is reserved for the government to fulfil its role of supervision and control. But this is not always done and often the gap is filled by big oil companies which leads to a confusion of responsibilities and powers. In this respect, the government should form a regulated power management department to come up with a plan for energy saving.

Some laws and regulations concerning energy saving are not properly enforced.

Energy saving enterprises are not enjoying sufficient encouragement. Enterprises feel ill at ease when forced to save energy but if they are offered rewards according to market rules, they will show more initiative.

In addition, lagging energy saving technology is slowing China's moves to this end. The government should invest more in updating energy saving equipment and technology.

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