On April 17, less than a week before the Biden administration’s
Earth Day climate summit April 22, which demonstrated return from the Trump administration’s distain for international cooperation in any forum and Trump’s skepticism about global warming, the U.S. and China produced a joint statement on their shared goals for reducing greenhouse gases. The word “coal” does not appear in the document.
That’s because China, the world’s largest coal consumer, is expanding, not scaling back, its appetite for the dirty diamonds that produce copious amounts of carbon dioxide but fuel the Chinese economy. This month, the International Energy Agency released a report predicting that worldwide fossil fuel demand will take off in 2021. The report said, “Demand for all fossil fuels is set to grow significantly in 2021. Coal demand alone is projected to increase by 60% more than all renewables combined, underpinning a rise in emissions of almost 5%, or 1 500 Mt. This expected increase would reverse 80% of the drop in 2020, with emissions ending up just 1.2% (or 400 Mt) below 2019 emissions levels.”
Said Fatih Birol, IEA executive director, “Global carbon emissions are set to jump by 1.5 billion tonnes this year – driven by in the resurgence of coal use in the power sector. This is a dire warning that the economic recovery from the Covid crisis is currently anything but sustainable for our climate.”
Leading the coal resurgence is China. The Los Angeles Times reported, “China, the largest consumer of coal in the world, continues to build new coal-fired power plants within its borders and in developing countries that are hungry for energy, whatever the risks. Xi offered vague assurances at the summit that he would move to ‘strictly control coal-fired generation projects’ — but not end them.”
As China began to get the Corona pandemic under control last year, its economy boomed, in part because of stimulus poured in by the government. The New York Times reported, “The capacity of China’s fleet of coal-fired power plants grew by a whopping 38 gigawatts in 2020, making up the vast majority of new coal projects worldwide and offsetting nearly the same amount of coal capacity that was retired worldwide.”
China has been a world leader in renewable technology, particularly solar photovoltaic. Just not in China. The country has focused on producing low-cost solar panels and has become the world leader in sales outside the country.
For years, China has boasted of its plans to build new nuclear plants, but those promises have largely been empty. Journalist Michael Standaert, who covers environment and energy in China and has lived there since 2007, wrote in Yale Environment360, “China’s National People’s Congress meetings, which ended earlier this month, were shrouded in both a real and figurative haze about how strong its climate ambitions really are and how quickly the country can wean itself from its main source of energy — coal.
Bloomberg reported in March from the National Peoples Congress, “China is offering new backing for the development of nuclear power as a key tool in its drive to cut carbon emissions.”
As is the case with most governments, it is more important to pay attention to what they are doing than what they are saying.
–Kennedy Maize