China is likely the worlds worst polluter. They burn scads of very dirty coal in old power plants and railroads. They are now second in Greenhouse gasses (and exempt from the Kyoto treaty).
http://healthandenergy.com/china_burning_more_coal.htm
*China is the world’s second largest emitter of such gases, after the United States. But China’s per-person energy use and greenhouse gas emissions remain far below levels found in richer countries. The emissions are, for example, roughly one-eighth of those per capita in the United States.
As a developing country, China is exempt from the Kyoto Protocol, the pending international agreement to limit emissions of greenhouse gases. When President Bush rejected the Kyoto Protocol two years ago, he portrayed China’s exemption as a serious flaw. The protocol has been embraced by most other big nations, however, and only requires ratification by Russia to take effect.
Another developing country exempt from the protocol, India, is also showing strong growth in emissions as its economy prospers. General Motors predicts that China will account for 18 percent of the world’s growth in new car sales from 2002 through 2012; the United States will be responsible for 11 percent, and India 9 percent.
Official Chinese statistics had shown a decline in coal production and consumption in the late 1990’s, even as the economy was growing 8 percent a year. But many Western and Chinese researchers have become suspicious of that drop over the last several years.
They point out that the decline assumed that local governments had followed Beijing’s instructions to close 47,000 small, unsafe mines producing low-grade coal and many heavily polluting small power plants. Yet researchers who visited mines and power plants found that they often remained open, with the output not being reported to Beijing because local administrators feared an outcry if they shut down important employers."*
http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F40C13F739550C728DDDAF0894DE404482
“One of China’s lesser-known exports is a dangerous brew of soot, toxic chemicals and climate-changing gases from the smokestacks of coal-burning power plants. In early April, a dense cloud of pollutants over Northern China sailed to nearby Seoul, sweeping along dust and desert sand before wafting across the Pacific…”
But China is the key. “The Chinese will surpass the coal-fired generating capacity and the CO2 emissions of the US in the next couple of years,” Mr. McIlvaine says.
And China currently has NO real standards for Fuel economy (although they have *plans * to make new standards that would make their cars slightly more fuel efficient but with less pollution standards:
http://www.globalpolicy.org/socecon/envronmt/2003/1118chinafuel.htm
"*The Chinese government is preparing to impose minimum fuel economy standards on new cars for the first time, and the rules will be significantly more stringent than those in the United States, according to Chinese experts involved in drafting them. The new standards are intended both to save energy and to force automakers to introduce the latest hybrid engines and other technology in China, in hopes of easing the nation’s swiftly rising dependence on oil imports from volatile countries in the Middle East.
They are the latest and most ambitious in a series of steps to regulate China’s rapidly growing auto industry, after moves earlier this year to require that air bags be provided for both front-seat occupants in most new vehicles and that new family vehicles sold in major cities meet air pollution standards nearly as strict as those in Western Europe and the United States.
Some popular vehicles now built in China by Western automakers, including the Chevrolet Blazer, do not measure up to the standards the government has drafted, and may have to be modified to get better gas mileage before the first phase of the new rules becomes effective in July 2005. The Chinese initiative comes at a time when Congress is close to completing work on a major energy bill that would make no significant changes in America’s fuel economy rules for vehicles. The Chinese standards, in general, call for new cars, vans and sport utility vehicles to get as much as two miles a gallon of fuel more in 2005 than the average required in the United States, and about five miles more in 2008. * "
But do note that what the announced public policy is and what really is allowed are often far apart in China.
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/13418952/
*Pan Yue, vice-minister of SEPA, predicted last summer at an environmental conference in Beijing that “the pollution load of China will quadruple by 2020” if nothing is done. Some 20% of the population lives in “severely polluted” areas, according to SEPA estimates, and 70% of the country’s rivers and lakes are in grim shape, figures the World Bank.
Changing all this will require a tremendous amount of political focus by Beijing. It will need to crack down on environmental renegades inside Chinese industry, encourage a move from high-sulfur coal as the mainland’s primary energy source, and push to secure the most environmentally friendly technologies from abroad…Some sort of pressure is desperately needed in China, where 60% of companies violate mainland emission rules, according to data compiled by World Bank senior environmental economist Hua Wang, who wrote a recent paper on the program*
that cite of yours is from 2003. Currently—as in, right now—China does have standards for automotive fuel efficiency (which went into effect last year, as your own quote from that cite noted).