Managing The Dragon

Will the Chinese buy A Tesla? The management of Tesla Motors, Inc. (NasdaqGS:TSLA) certainly hopes so. At the Detroit Auto Show, Tesla announced its plans to open a dealership in Beijing — its first store in China — this spring. George Blankenship, the company’s vice president of worldwide sales, said the store will house an [...]

The ink on the paper with my predictions for China was barely dry when what may become “the” story of 2013 came onto the scene—air quality. If I knew then what I know now, I would have had to have included a discussion about air quality. In the run-up to the Beijing Olympics in 2008, [...]

On Wednesday in Beijing, the Information Office of the State Council, China’s cabinet, published the country’s first white paper, on China’s rare earth industry. Some of the information in the report caused a stir in the U.S. equity markets. Shares of Molycorp, Inc. (NYSE: MCP), owner of the Mountain Pass rare earth mine in California, [...]

With the price of a gallon of gasoline in the United States now at $4 — and climbing — CNBC’s Rick Santelli is making it his personal mission to demonstrate to the world that cars can easily be converted to run on natural gas. Santelli is best known for starting the Tea Party movement with [...]

By all appearances, China’s central government is getting serious about electric vehicles. As we discussed in our recent post on Driving in Beijing, buying an electric vehicle is one way to get around the restrictions that Beijing began to impose this year on the issuance of new license plates. But, there are other benefits to [...]

As a follow-up to our previous post, air quality in Beijing over the past four days was as bad as I have seen it in my 15 years here. Today’s headline in China Daily, Capital’s air quality “worst,” summed it up best. According to the Beijing municipal environmental protection bureau’s website, air quality in Huangcun [...]

On days like today and the last few that we’ve had in Beijing, when the air is so thick that you can almost cut it with a knife, you have to wonder whether China is taking the environment seriously. In fact, air quality was so bad at the China Open on Thursday that the organizers [...]

In an interview with Alex Dumortier of The Motley Fool in 2008, I was asked which industries I thought had good future prospects in China. I mentioned several growth areas, but Alex focused on my third suggestion: “any technology that has anything to do with the environment.” With China having now surpassed the United States [...]

CBS News had an interesting take on the development of the global green industry. While start-ups have played a crucial role in getting the industry off the ground, CBS believes that the future will be dominated by large, industrial companies which it calls “Green Giants.” Why? Green technology involves revamping the physical infrastructure of the [...]

It was supposed to be history in the making when representatives from 192 countries met in Copenhagen to formulate a global solution to what some believe is the biggest problem facing mankind. Instead, it degenerated into a sometimes tawdry display of finger-pointing and trading of barbs between representatives from the developed countries of the world [...]