Red light, green light

摘要

"Environmental pollution has be-come a major problem, which is nature's red-light warning." Those green-tinged words do not come from an activist. Rather, they come from China's leaders, who gathered this week in Beijing for a big annual meeting. On March 5th Li Keqiang, the prime minister, vowed to declare war on pollution. The timing could not have been better, then, for the launch of a firm devoted to the manufacture of greener engines. The same day EcoMotors, a startup backed by Bill Gates and Khosla Ventures (supported by Vinod Khosla, a Californian venture capitalist), unveiled its joint venture with a division of China faw Group, a local carmaker. The Chinese partner vowed to spend more than $2oom on a factory in Shanxi, a northern province, that will produce 100.000 of the new engines a vear.