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Opinion
The high price of Hong Kong’s slow switch to electric buses and taxis
Slow electrification undermines the city’s green ambitions and squanders a chance to secure its role as a Greater Bay Area innovation hub
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Quentin Parker is professor emeritus at the University of Hong Kong and CEO and co-founder of the NGO S3+1.
Hong Kong sees itself as a modern, well-governed, global city that moves with the times. On finance, education, legal services and logistics, that self-image holds. But when considering the green transition, particularly transport electrification, the gap between rhetoric and reality is increasingly hard to ignore.
Nowhere is this more evident than in electrifying the taxi fleet, where the quarter-century timeline floated bears little resemblance to what is standard practice in neighbouring Shenzhen and other mainland cities and increasingly globally.
Hong Kong is not devoid of environmental ambition. It has committed to carbon neutrality by 2050. It has published a Climate Action Plan, Clean Air Plan and road map for electric vehicles (EVs). Coal is being phased down in power generation and the Lamma power station is moving from coal to gas – cleaner, yes, though still fossil fuel.
Importantly, given our fintech expertise and global financial clout, the city is positioning itself as a regional hub for green finance, using its capital market strengths to support regional low‑carbon projects.
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