Coal accounted for 28% of energy production last year in a ‘marked shift toward lower-carbon fuels,’ BP says in annual energy review
Global coal production saw its largest decrease on record in 2016, as China and the U.S. dug up less of the commodity and burned less of it for electricity.. U.S. output declined 19% and Chinese production fell almost 8%... Renewables such as wind and solar power were the fastest-growing energy sources in 2016, BP said, increasing output by 12%. Renewables now provide just under 4% of the world’s energy, up from 2.8% of global energy consumption in 2015..BP said oil consumption continued to rise at a strong pace in 2016, up 1.6% in 2016, which was above the 10-year average. The company sees a peak in oil demand around 2040, when consumption will begin to fall globally.
Culture Clash at a Chinese-Owned Plant in Ohio
a major culture clash is playing out on the factory floor, with some workers questioning the company’s commitment to operating under American supervision and American norms.
.. The union, which began meeting with workers in 2015, escalated its public efforts in April with a fiery meeting highlighting arbitrarily enforced rules and retaliation against those who speak up.
.. a former employee named James Martin said the company had exposed him to harsh chemicals that blistered his arms and diminished his lung capacity. (Mr. Martin lost his job for excessive absences while on workers’ compensation leave in January.)
.. But projects can suffer when investors are unfamiliar with the American regulatory and political environment, as is true for many executives in China, where labor standards tend to be less strictly enforced.
.. He said the Chinese had little interest in training, sharing responsibility with or even engaging with American employees.
.. He lamented that productivity at the plant “is not as high as we have in China,” adding that “some of the workers are just idling around.”
.. entrepreneurs like Mr. Cao often populate their factories with migrants from rural areas, whom they expect to be relatively submissive, unlike American workers, who expect a more collegial management style. “He hasn’t ever had probably this type of pressure from a work force,” she said.
.. But he conceded that “the fundamental difference between Chinese and Americans is that the Chinese have a bias toward speed; Americans like to process things, think it through from all angles.”
.. Chinese overseas investments in Africa and Asia showed a pattern of reluctance to transfer operations to local control.
.. “At the managerial level, you see that the technical staff tends to be from China,” she said. “The one local employee they hire at a senior managerial level would be the human resources director.”
Trump Lies. China Thrives.
China has moved so fast into a cashless society, where everyone pays for everything with a mobile phone, that Chinese newspapers report beggars in major cities have started to place a printout of a QR code in their begging bowls so any passer-by can scan it and use mobile payment apps like Alibaba’s Alipay
.. Chinese men and women friends tell me they don’t carry purses or wallets anymore, only a mobile phone, which they use for everything — including for buying vegetables from street vendors.
.. the fact that China has 700 million people doing so many transactions daily on the mobile internet means it’s piling up massive amounts of information that can be harvested to identify trends and spur new artificial intelligence applications.
.. Trump’s broad complaint that China is not playing fair on trade and has grown in some areas at the expense of U.S. and European workers has merit and needs to be addressed — now
.. when the U.S. allowed China to join the World Trade Organization in 2001 and gain much less restricted access to our markets, we gave China the right to keep protecting parts of its market — because it was a “developing economy.” The assumption was that as China reformed and become more of our equal, its trade barriers and government aid to Chinese companies would melt away.
.. China grew in strength, became America’s equal in many fields and continued to protect its own companies from foreign competition, either by limiting access or demanding that foreign companies take on a Chinese partner and transfer their intellectual property to China as the price of access, or by funneling Chinese firms low-interest loans to grow and buy foreign competitors.
.. 81 percent of its members felt “less welcome” in China than in the past and had little confidence any longer that China would carry through on promises to open its markets.
.. China tells the world that its policy is “reform and opening,” but on the ground its policy “more resembles reform and closing.”
.. Alibaba can set up its own cloud server in America, but Amazon or Microsoft can’t do the same in China. China just agreed to allow U.S. credit card giants, like Visa and MasterCard, access to its huge market — something it was required to do under W.T.O. rules but just dragged its feet on for years
.. The world leader in industrial robots, the German company Kuka Robotics, was just bought by the Chinese company Midea; Beijing would never allow the U.S. to buy one of China’s industrial gems like that.
China’s Debt Crackdown Is Driving Borrowers Into Riskier Territory
Beijing’s game of Whac-A-Mole against financial risks is sending some borrowers into darker corners
China’s crackdown on debt is driving some companies to a murkier form of financing as it gets harder to secure bank loans or tap the bond market.
New loans from so-called trusts, firms that raise money from individuals and corporations to plow into riskier areas of the economy, reached 882.3 billion yuan ($129.5 billion) in the first four months of this year, according to data from the People’s Bank of China, nearly five times as much as the same period in 2016.
Trust firms, which often charge borrowers higher rates than banks, occupy a middle ground between banking and asset management. They are licensed and loosely regulated by China’s banking watchdog, but they lack some of banks’ protections, such as government deposit insurance, and they have more flexibility to invest in risky areas than banks do.