China Watch Blog

China Watch Blog has learnt that China is planning a major energy plan.  To promote the development of the emerging energy industries and meet the carbon emissions reduction targets of 2020, the National Energy Administration (NEA) has compiled a development plan for emerging energy industries from 2011 to 2020 that will require direct investments totaling 5 trillion yuan, according to the NEA on July 20.

Jiang Bing, director-general of the Policy Planning Department under the NEA, said that the plan has specified major policy measures for the development and utilization of nuclear, wind, solar, biomass, geothermal, unconventional natural gas and other new energies. The plan has also detailed the industrialized application of new clean coal, smart grid, distributed energy and alternative-fuel vehicle technologies.

According to initial calculations, the new plan will greatly ease China’s excessive reliance on coal in 2020 and cut sulfur dioxide emissions by about 7.8 million tons and carbon dioxide emissions by about 1.2 billion tons in a year. Furthermore, this will contribute 1.5 trillion yuan in added-value per year and create 15 million job opportunities.

The key energy structural adjustment tasks during the 12th Five-Year Plan period include taking effective measures to increase energy efficiency, enhancing the utilization levels of traditional clean energy and expanding the utilization scales of natural gas and other clean energies. It also includes accelerating the construction of hydropower and nuclear power facilities, according to a People’s Daily report.

Most of us know that when a labour dispute is triggered off, the resulting tussle could end up with loss huge sums of money. So, officials in south China’s Guangdong Province on Wednesday reviewed a draft of the country’s first law that sets the rules for labor disputes and wage negotiations to ease labor tensions.

The new law hopes to “turn the lose-lose labor disputes into win-win negotiations” as it is expected to save unnecessary costs for both workers and employers through orderly negotiations, said Liu Mu, head of the labor law department of the standing committee of the Guangdong Provincial People’s Congress, the provincial legislative body.

The Regulation on the Democratic Management of Enterprises in Guangdong aims to solve two major labor issues — poor welfare and low payment, said Ou Guangyuan, head of the standing committee of Guangdong’s People’s Congress.

Guangdong first mulled creating such a law about a year ago, but stopped reviewing it amid the global economic crisis for fear of increasing the burden on companies.

But a spate of strikes and worker suicides in Guangdong prompted authorities to relaunch the review of the law, Ou said.