How fast is China moving?

"China hits rocky road over diesel demand" doesn't sound like the most interesting thing you might read today, but I think it might be something I've been looking for for a while. Key quote: "The Chinese government is rationing electricity supply as it rushes to meet ambitious energy and environmental targets by the year's end, hence boosting demand for diesel, power generators, and even candles as the country scrambles for extra power."

There's been something of a narrative for a while that the Chinese, although unwilling to sign anything on the international treaty front, are nonetheless actually moving just about as fast as they can to curtail energy use. This is, I think, the story China itself would tell; and there's certainly a lot going on in China. But one also wants to be careful not to be diplomatically naive. It's in China's best interest to tell that story, but is it true? Could China move faster if it had incentives to do so? How would you tell the difference?

This is one possibility. If the Chinese government is pushing efficiency requirements so hard that companies are actually going off-grid and buying up diesel in quantities big enough to cause local diesel shortages and warrant international notice, it seems unlikely that there are a lot of easily accessed, unexecuted alternative efficiency measures available to them, at least in the short term.

In this case, it looks like it may be a temporary effect caused by a strong push to meet some targets - so it's not clear whether this is unavoidable crunch or just a failure to manage well over the long term resulting in a short term crisis. And you'd also want to look at whether companies had in fact made use of available efficiency measures before turning to local generation (if they hadn't, it would suggest there was just something broken about the process.) But in a general sense, spillover into costly stop-gap measures like this seems like the kind of evidence you might look for to assess whether reform was approaching its maximum rate or not.