The government has also kicked off new energy-saving policies in transportation. In December 2008, the NDRC, Ministry of Finance, Ministry of Transportation and State Administration of Taxation jointly released a draft gasoline tax plan for public comment, which was scheduled to take effect on January 1, 2009. The plan annuls six types of fees for road and waterway maintenance and management, and raises the gasoline tax from 0.2 yuan ($0.03) to 1 yuan ($0.15) per liter and the diesel tax from 0.1 yuan ($0.15) to 0.8 yuan ($0.12) per liter.

On February 17, four ministries including the Ministry of Finance and Ministry of Science and Technology announced the government would offer cash rebates up to hundreds of thousands of yuan per vehicle (tens of thousands of U.S. dollars) to buyers of alternative-energy passenger cars and buses in 13 major cities, including Beijing and Shanghai. In the next four years, the government will subsidize 60,000 green vehicles for use in the 13 pilot cities.

Construction is also a key energy-saving area, according to the report. Statistics from the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development show that buildings consume about 27.5 percent of the total energy consumed by end users. This February, an official from the ministry told xinhuanet.com that by the end of 2009, more than 90 percent of new structures will meet the mandatory energy-saving standards.

This year, China will come up with relevant laws and regulations on energy efficiency standards, said Han Yi, Director of the Department of Computation under the General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine.

A promising industry

Clean energy industry might become the pivotal driver of the next cycle of economic prosperity, said Li Xiangyang, Deputy Director of the Institute of World Economics and Politics under the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. He said this when the institute released its 2009 world economic outlook.

According to a recently released United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) report titled Global Trends in Substantial Energy Investment 2008, investors flock to renewable energy and efficiency technologies. The report says that investment capital flowing into renewable energy grew from $80 billion in 2005 to a record $100 billion in 2006 and 9 percent of those global investments were made in China, while 21 percent were made in developing countries.

The UNEP report says that China's sustainable energy investment increased by 91 percent in 2007 to a record high of $10.8 billion, most of which was directed to wind power generating projects.

Growth in the energy-efficiency and environmental-protection industries would be a big trend, said Xu Yusheng, an academician in the Chinese Academy of Engineering and an NPC deputy.