Chinese bureaucrats blasted for energy-wasting office buildings - Yahoo! News

Chinese bureaucrats blasted for energy-wasting office buildings - Yahoo! News

BEIJING (AFP) - The Chinese government has blasted local officials for setting a bad example in energy conservation with their luxurious office buildings, state media reported Wednesday.
Some local governments pursue new, unique and special office buildings, but totally neglect their energy efficiency, the China Daily said, citing Qiu Baoxing, deputy minister of construction.
"This is not the White House," Qiu told a gathering of officials in Beijing, while pointing at a slide showing a magnificent office building. "This is the office building of a district government."
Qiu said statistics showed most office buildings in China's major cities were far less energy efficient than those in other international cities with similar climates.
Part of the problem was that construction companies failed to keep their promises for more energy-efficient buildings, Qiu said.
The paper quoted Qiu as saying almost 95 percent of the new designs proposed last year met energy conservation standards, while more than half of the finished buildings did not.
China previously said it was aiming to cut energy consumption per unit of gross domestic product by 20 percent and pollution by 10 percent by 2010 from levels in 2005.
But the project got off to a bad start, with Chinese officials admitting recently they had come nowhere near reaching the targets for 2006.
Energy consumption per unit of
GDP' name=c1> SEARCHNews News Photos Images Web' name=c3> GDP fell by just 1.23 percent last year, instead of 4.0 percent as planned.