The distinction is important, because coal is seen as a cheap way of feeding China's relentless appetite for growth (or more specifically, the appetite for the perceived advantages brought by this "growth" to those who are in a social or political position to benefit from it.)
Re: China, there's clearly not an effort to move away from coal if they're constructing new plants. The percentages may be less, but if the overarching thesis is to limit things that produce CO2 altogether, this statistic is irrelevant when contrasted with their actions.
I am confused by this argument as it seems to be orthogonal to the point the GP was making, namely that coal does have a large impact on the global environment. Stating that China uses a lot of coal isn't exactly helping your case, considering that coal causes more air pollution deaths in China than any other source[1].
> China has more focus on renewables than the US at this point.
A meaningless statement as they continue to aggressively expand their use of coal and coal power plant manufacturing both domestically and across Asia.
China is nearly using as much coal as the rest of the world combined. They're using four to five times as much as the US.
Their actions are what matter, not their words. Their plans for renewables coincides with their plan to increase emissions perpetually as they see fit.
Apr 2019: "Edward Cunningham, a specialist on China and its energy markets at Harvard University, tells NPR that China is building or planning more than 300 coal plants in places as widely spread as Turkey, Vietnam, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Egypt and the Philippines."
Mar 2019: "The largest power producers in China have asked the government to allow for the development of between 300 and 500 new coal power plants by 2030 in a move that could single-handedly jeopardise global climate change targets. ... The cap would enable China to build 2 large coal power stations a month for the next 12 years, and grow the country’s capacity by an amount nearly twice the size of Europe’s total coal capacity."
If we are pointing out that China has more coal generation than everyone else, we should not leave out the fact that China has more solar generation capability than the rest of the world combined, and that their wind generation matches the next top 7 countries combined.
China is a big country with 3x the population of the USA and the world’s largest manufacturing sector, so it’s quite understandable that China has intense energy needs from multiple forms of generation.
I would say that China chooses coal because of its geographic supply, just like the USA often chooses natural gas.
Running out of oil and having a climate crisis due to excessive carbon emissions aren’t mutually exclusive events.
Their total coal consumption is rising again.[1] US coal use as a percentage of its energy base is far too high at ~30%. China is twice that at 60%.
When you have the extraordinary financial resources that China has and your coal use is climbing despite nearly consuming more coal than the rest of the world combined, it's not enough to add renewable energy, you must aggressively remove coal. China isn't doing that and they never said they would. Their public plans include decades more of coal consumption near present levels.
Greater Asia Pacific is consuming four times the coal of the US and EU combined (representing nearly $40 trillion of GDP).
> We import natural gas from America which has higher CO2 emissions and cost than Coal,
Not true. Virtually all of the energy from coal comes from burning carbon, while a significant amount of the energy in natural gas results from burning hydrogen.
In fact, burning natural gas emits only about half the carbon for a given amount of energy output.
You're ignoring the differing resource costs. China can freely consume domestic, brown coal for manufacturing purposes, in a significantly cheaper way than any Western country.
There, at that conference, China pledged CO2 emissions would peak by 2030. Xi said that China would “strictly control coal-fired power generation projects”.
Since then the country's been plagued by power shortages and has been building coal fired stations as a stop gap.
Coal and China is complicated - in the past two decades China has closed down a very large number of quite old and quite polluting coal stations that had high emmissions.
In that time they've built a few nuclear stations, a lot of solar and hydro, and a number of larger more efficient coal stations that run cleaner.
So, they're still building coal, they've improved the situation wrt pollution from coal, they're committed to ending coal, that's not going to be easy.
China’s coal addiction puts spotlight on its climate ambitions before Cop28
>Beijing plans to cut annual coal consumption by 13 million metric tons
China uses over 50% of all world coal production (and produces nearly half itself, on top of importing an amount roughly equal to 40% of American production).
Of the ~7800 million metric tons produced, China used about ~4000 million metric tons of coal between power and steel industry.
Unsure of source quality (but then again, original article is based on numbers from unnamed/anonymous PRC Party Official, so this source is probably just as good/bad): http://www.worldcoal.org/resources/coal-statistics/
> China's use of coal has probably peaked. Any developing country would do well to follow China's lead...
Hmm. I think it's more correct to say the /rate of increase/ of China's use of coal has probably peaked.
"China added 39 gigawatts of coal-fired capacity in 2014 — 3 gigawatts more than it added in 2013. That is equivalent to three 1,000 megawatt units every four weeks.[v] At the peak, from 2005 through 2011, China added about two 600-megawatt coal plants a week, for 7 straight years. And, China is expected to add the equivalent of a new 600-megawatt plant every 10 days for the next 10 years. "
Yes, the central government wants to use coal more efficiently and to curb acutely harmful air pollution. China's energy mix is now less coal-heavy than it was 10 years ago. Since China's total energy use is still growing robustly, a declining share for coal does not necessarily mean a declining absolute quantity (tonnage) of coal. According to your own link, "Among the fossil fuels, consumption growth was led by natural gas (+18%) and oil (+5.0%), while coal use rose (+0.9%), the second consecutive year of growth."
Well.. in China and India only basically. As far as I understand it's about their need to scale up energy production. They can't scale up wind and solar fast enough even if it's cheaper, so they build out both. When they don't need to increase construction so rapidly they will shift build out more and more to cheaper stuff.
1) A substantial portion of the Chinese coal is burned to produce steel and other products that are exported to the United States.
2) Burning that coal here (where there are environmental regulations) would produce less damage that burning it in China (where there are effectively none).
I'm not sure why this is confusing.
I'm also not sure why people are modding down factual posts. That type of behavior is exactly what's given you President Trump.
The distinction is important, because coal is seen as a cheap way of feeding China's relentless appetite for growth (or more specifically, the appetite for the perceived advantages brought by this "growth" to those who are in a social or political position to benefit from it.)
reply