The UK government’s plan to provide a £5,000 for electric cars has attracted a lot of criticism in the press: their environmental benefits are fiction; charging them ‘will lead to blackouts’; and they’re unpopular.

The current generation of wholly electric vehicles are beset with shortcomings; battery life, speed, and charging times and locations mean that buying one is not a simple decision. But this is changing quickly: China is planning to become a big player in development and manufacturing – likely giving GM, which has been developing its Volt for years, a push; and new business models, such as removable batteries, are being developed to address the charging issue.

As many have pointed out, the Toyota Prius hybrid was unprofitable and less than popular for years before it turned the corner.

But, looking back, we find that motor cars themselves were the subject of ridicule for years before they became fast enough to escape mocking.

China’s annual coal production has been growing so quickly recently (200Mt) that it its growth almost matches Russia’s total production. Chinese demand is so strong that the country is witnessing the largest expansion of coal-fired power generation capacity in history. All this has been fuelled by and has helped fuel the economic expansion that has improved standards of living in China and many countries around the world. But that is where the niceties end in the latest major report by the International Energy Agency, the rich countries’ watchdog. That is because all this growth has come at a significant cost.

China’s Ministry of Environment Protection says it will crackdown on heavily polluting, the Xinhua news agency reported, high energy-consuming and resource-intensive industries.

Via Cleaner Greener China:

Last year, environmental departments sent out more than 1.6 million officers to inspect about 70,000 enterprises. To date they have punished 15,000 enterprises for breaking environmental laws. More than 100 local government officials and department officers have been investigated.

That’s a lot of officers. But they do have quite a task:

According to the MEP’s random inspection in February, about 15.5 percent of projects started construction without approval. And about 9.6 percent of enterprises closed for environmental reasons resumed production without permission. Treatment facilities at about 25 percent of the main sources of pollution were not running properly.

Related links:

China’s MEPs tell polluters to clean up their act (Xinhua)
China’s environmental compiance rates (China Environmental Law)