Gas guzzlers are a big hit in China

[RamboLiberal]

Source: MSNBC/AP

High, wide and fuel-hungry, the gleaming black Cadillac Escalade on display at the Beijing auto show is an unlikely car for an era of record oil prices.

But while sport utility vehicle sales in the U.S. are tumbling, automakers are finding that for China's newly prosperous car buyers, bigger is still better.

So General Motors Corp. has made the Escalade a star of its auto-show display and is eager to get it on the market here.

"If you look at the fastest-growing market segments in China, there are two — SUVs and luxury cars," said Joseph Y.H. Liu, GM China's vice president for sales and marketing.

Auto sales in China are booming, with analysts and automakers forecasting growth at 15-20 percent this year. But demand for the biggest vehicles is even stronger, with sales of luxury cars and SUVs expected to surge by 40-45 percent.



Read more: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24242758/

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Wonderful! Now the greedy bastard automakers are going to kill the U.S. and China off with Escalades. That's really going to do wonders for killing off the Chinese with pollution and choke all of us with continuing escalating oil prices.

I'm bitter at the shortsightedness and greed of the last 25+ years!

[UndertheOcean]

1. Stupid Stupid Stupid !

[guyanakoolaid]

2. We might as well not talk about what other countries do until we get our own shit together

We are the world's number one big-truck polluting consuming country, it's almost hypocrisy to even discuss another nation's problem.

[girl gone mad]

7. Nonsense.

There are 4 times as many Chinese as Americans. We better start discussing it before it's too late.

[guyanakoolaid]

8. Yet we pollute more than they do. Odd.

[NickB79]

9. Actually, China now produces more CO2 than the US

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2007/jun/19/china.usnews

"The surprising announcement will increase anxiety about China's growing role in driving man-made global warming and will pile pressure onto world politicians to agree a new global agreement on climate change that includes the booming Chinese economy. China's emissions had not been expected to overtake those from the US, formerly the world's biggest polluter, for several years, although some reports predicted it could happen as early as next year."

One new coal-fired plant PER WEEK will do that to a country.

[girl gone mad]

10. That's not accurate.

China recently surpassed us in CO2 emissions, but in the race to turn the environment into an ecological wasteland, they blew past us a long time ago.

A fourth of the country is now desert. More than three-fourths of its forests have disappeared. Each year, uncontrollable underground fires, sometimes triggered by lightning or mining accidents, consume 200 million tons of coal, contributing massively to global warming. A miasma of lead, mercury, sulfur dioxide, and other elements of coal-burning and car exhaust hovers over most Chinese cities.

...

Acid rain caused by China's sulfur-dioxide emissions severely damages forests and watersheds in Korea and Japan and impairs air quality in the US. Every major river system flowing out of China is threatened with one sort of cataclysm or another. The surge in untreated waste and agricultural runoff pouring into the Yellow and China Seas has caused frequent fish die-offs, and overfishing is endangering many ocean species.

The growing Chinese taste for furs and exotic foods and pets is devastating neighboring countries' populations of everything from gazelles to wolves, and turtles to parrots, while its appetite for shark fin soup is causing drastic declines in shark populations throughout the oceans. According to a study published in Science in March 2007, the absence of the oceans' top predators is causing a resurgence of skates and rays, which are in turn destroying scallop fisheries along America's Eastern Seaboard. Enthusiasm for traditional Chinese medicine is causing huge declines in populations of hundreds of animals – including tigers, pangolins, and sea horses. Seeking oil, timber, and other natural resources, China is building massive roads, bridges, and dams throughout Africa, often disregarding international environmental and social standards.

[heliarc]

11. Pollution in China is quite bad now...

A lot is also unchecked...

http://current.com/items/76355482_toxic_villages

But as this Vanguard Pod shows: the burden of culpability for pollution problems rests on both of us. For example, highly toxic E-Waste from our country ends up in theirs... then they dispose of it or recycle it improperly. The reason for outsourcing is because this is literally a dirty expensive job to do right so often the E-waste is just dumped on developing nations who offer a lower price for the service of extracting potentially reusable metals. Cost savings in the US equal higher company earnings reports and drive up stock values. We benefit monetarily, the treasure is brought to "Rome" and the world's ecosystems move one more step towards ruin.

[darue]

3. human apes are hard-wired to ostentatiously waste resources as a status display

but fuck, try to explain that to anyone. might as well be... TEENAGE CAVE MAN

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rR6vJz12g8I

[JohnnyCougar]

4. I don't think people realize how much China is actually a threat.

Poor human rights record, disdainful of their own citizenry, no pollution control, product safety, etc. Despite China's ridiculous claim of Socialism, it's more like a feudalist government turning towards fascism. At least under Mao they had good healthcare, now the don't even have that.

[KillCapitalism]

5. What's next for China?

Are they all going to want 8,000 sq. ft. McMansions too?

[Jack_DeLeon]

6. Paid for with our money...

when we buy chinese trinkets they use that money to "improve" their way of life and compete with us for the precious resources that we once used to have mostly for ourselves.

We have no one to blame but ourselves. We could have paid more in wages to keep Americans working and keep our economy going, but we would rather pay chinese slave wage, and the fat cats over there get rich instead. We end up paying in the end do the increased prices of commodities.

[heliarc]

12. Don't forget

the fat cats here who are raising the price of goods sold here. The US companies who are responsible for outsourcing all that manufacturing work to make those Chinese trinkets (Wal-Mart, Fisher Price, etc) are making a killing and our economy requires it. If stock prices don't go up, investors are very unhappy. There's a lot of pressure on industry to cut costs, and that sends a lot of money overseas to people who are willing to do the work for pennies. The really Fat cats are invariably US CEO's and production companies whose design has been to charge a premium at the retail level in the US and then slash their own costs when sourcing foreign Labor. That means huge profits for US companies. Of course China benefits from all of that, but it does on a different scale. More are employed and the cost of living is substantially lower in China (even if it's harder for people there to make enough to meet the costs). The Cats who got the fattest off of Chinese outsourced labor are right here in the US of A, and we shouldn't forget that.

[riverdeep]

13. The worst of both worlds.

The rampant, resource-hungry wastefulness and profit at any cost and ecological destruction of America, and the iron-fisted lack of freedom of China. You can bet the children of the modern Chinese will all want to live the American bigger and better lifestyle. Adding billions more people into the great petri dish already showing the markers of overgrowth.

And don't forget India. They want the Malibu lifestyle, too.

[DS1]

14. Fuck you, GM

[Javaman]

15. Speeding toward the cliff in over sized gas guzzling air cooled comfort. nt