Guest essay by Eric Worrall
h/t Dr. Willie Soon / James Delingpole / Breitbart – Progressives are alarmed that if President Trump successfully defuses the North Korean nuclear standoff, a flood of North Korean coal on world markets might accelerate global warming.
Here’s how climate factors into Trump’s talks with Kim
NORTH KOREA
Jean Chemnick, E&E News reporter
Published: Monday, May 21, 2018
…
Experts doubt the climate pact will play a role in the historic meeting between Trump and Kim scheduled for next month in Singapore. But if the summit occurs, they say, it could have a negative effect on global warming.
That’s because if sanctions against North Korea are lifted, the hermit nation’s coal could flow onto the world market, with the bulk of it ending up in South Korea, Japan and China. Also, the United States and its allies once again are offering to help North Korea provide electricity to its people — a sweetener that has been used in the past and that would likely be accomplished with fossil fuel technology that would take advantage of North Korea’s domestic coal reserves.
The country has an estimated 100 billion metric tons of coal in reserve, and exporting it is an economic mainstay. Last year, the U.N. Security Council responded to North Korea’s missile tests by slapping a $400 million annual cap on North Korean coal exports.
Ming Wan, a professor of government and politics at George Mason University, said the loss of access to the Chinese market has been particularly painful for Pyongyang. China had been increasing its purchases of North Korean coal in recent years. Reuters reported last week that North Korean traders have responded to hopes that sanctions might be lifted soon by selling coal to Chinese buyers at cut-rate prices and stockpiling it for them inside North Korea.
The relaxation of sanctions would almost certainly be part of any deal to persuade North Korea to abandon its nuclear arsenal.
…
Most ordinary North Koreans live without power during the day, despite the country’s status as a net energy exporter. That energy poverty kept North Korea’s greenhouse gas emissions at 63.8 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent in 2013, while South Korea put out 673.5 MtCO2e — more than 10 times as much.
Pompeo said if North Korea denuclearized, U.S. capital would flow into sectors of its economy ranging from agriculture to power infrastructure.
…
Read more (paywalled): https://www.eenews.net/climatewire/stories/1060082225/search?keyword=north+korea
I think I understand the point E&E is trying to make. We shouldn’t be trying to improve the lives of North Koreans, we should be learning from them, so we shall know how to survive when our carbon footprints are reduced to North Korean levels.
That’s a positive not a negative .
Yes………….I agree !
Much better to have a nice slow gradual warming with coal
( if it actually WOULD make any difference !? )
than a sudden warming with thermo-nuclear explosions !
Groan. Head in hands. Deep sigh of exasperation. So what is good is bad and what is bad is no fault of theirs. Never mind. Frankly Donald is starting to look the better for each day he is in office. If you disagree you could always go to Netflix for the Obama perspective. Getting cold where I am. Some coal wouldn’t be unwelcome.
The true believers don’t do positive!
The Propaganda Ministry has them in a perpetual state of misery.
If it saves one life, it’s worth it. Do it for the children….
Not good at all.
Who does that remind you of?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/world/world-without-power/
The goal of the left is to make the Western democracies like North Korea. They. of course would rull us in profligate splendour like Kim and his mates.
I guess that fits. Somewhere vbetween rule us and gull us…
Predictable
The elite green blob more interested in maintaining their own comfortable lives than liberating an entire country from poverty.
Qu’ils mangent de la brioche.
Ditto in South Africa – for 10 years the ANC government, led by Jacob Zuma, have been robbing the country blind. And we have 18 million on some kind of welfare grant, and about 4 million actual taxpayers. AND the government want to go green, with renewable power and a carbon tax…
Can we in the UK have some of this coal please?
That way:
1) our climate (supposedly) will warm;
2) our electricity will be cheaper;
3) we have some nice power stations in Yorkshire that can be reconverted back to coal, thus saving forests and wildlife in the eastern USA.
3 wins! What’s not to like?
Ian Magness
+97%!
The green fascists would not like having less control over those who are in need.
Don’t expect too much from North Korea. link
President Trump reminds me somewhat of President Reagan. link The Soviets couldn’t be sure what Reagan would do. They had to treat him seriously and had to follow his lead into an arms race that wrecked the Soviet economy and resulted in its breakup. link
North Korea doesn’t know what Trump will do. For sure he will not grovel to get some kind of useless deal. The only constraint is China which has said it will not tolerate an unfriendly regime on the other side of the Yalu river. Other than that, all possibilities are on the table.
All the winning over these past 16 months…
So much more winning to come.
This is a nutty article. The journalist gives no authority for his claim that NK has 100 billion tones of coal reserve. According to Wiki, that is more than China. Wiki says they have about 600 million tons; less than Albania. Probably no-one really knows, but a guess from this E&E guy won’t help.
As for “that energy poverty”, sanctions stop NK exporting coal. They don’t stop them using it.
+97
The article is massively nutty… But…
https://www.eia.gov/beta/international/analysis.cfm?iso=PRK
Reserves ≠ Production
Like the author you didn’t do your homework Nick. The authors claim is wrong because he misread it from here
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mining_in_North_Korea
What got lost to him is it was a combined figure of coal and limestone with the limestone being the larger.
The actual proven reserves of coal in North Korea agreed by most exploration groups is 4.5Million tons and to put that in perspective that is twice the reserves at the proposed Adani Carmichael coal mine in Queensland Australia.
It is sizeable by any means and if the greens groups are worried about about the Carmichael coal mine going ahead they would have to be worried about that lot being used. So I would say the green concerns reported are correct.
North Korea has only two sources of electrical power generation coal and hydropower. The last reported breakdown was coal accounted for about 86% of production but there totally energy consumption peaked at 224 TWh for a year.
A tonne of coal produces roughly 2 MWh of energy so they are using 224000/2 = 112000 tons of coal a year, at 86% that is 96,000 tons. So now 4,500,000/96,000 = 46.875 years
So basically in answer to your question Nick they are using it but there consumption is so low they have over 50 years supply just in proven resources without finding another source.
I was provoked by the above to look at the proposed Adani mine and the actual figures submitted are
That number is substantially bigger than the initial industry estimates. The coal is a lower quality but on those numbers the proposed Adani mine is a lot bigger than the entire reserves of North Korea.
According to Euracol ‘the voice of coal in Europe’: ‘The UK has identified hard coal resources of 3,560 million tonnes, although total resources could be as large as 187 billion tonnes. About 80 million tonnes of the economically recoverable reserves are available in shallow deposits capable of being extracted by surface mining. There are also about 1 000 million tonnes of lignite resources, mainly in Northern Ireland, although no lignite is mined at present.’
https://euracoal.eu/info/country-profiles/united-kingdom/
That must explain why we’re burning American trees.
What is the situation on clean coal. Tony Heller claims that you can make a coal plant so clean that the emissions are no more than a natural gas plant.
It may only possibly contribute to globule warming because all those liberal heads would be exploding and releasing all that “carbon” intot he atmosphere.
To alarmists, modernization is evil.
“…modernization is evil.”
Then take their electronic junk and toys and “comfort” stuff away from them and make them live the way the Norks do – in utter poverty, with poor nutrition at best, zero at its worst, freezing cold in the winter and no A/C in the summer, among all the other things they take for granted.
Put them in a NoMansLand of Nothing Modern and see how long they last. I’d give it about a half hour before they start crying.
It’s not so much modernization as it’s prosperity.
It’s not so much prosperity as it’s other people’s prosperity.
Well, ye, you can expect that North Korean energy use and standard of living will skyrocket toward South Korean’s and Chinese’s… so what? “You quit your WMD, we help you getting wealthier, and you can even keep your dictatorship” seems a fair deal to me.
Looks to me you need to live in an alternate mental universe to worry about climate change impact of a happy solution of the current unpleasant Korean situation.
But obviously, lots of warmunists DO think that climate change issue supersede any other, including war, hunger, poverty, etc. so this shouldn’t be a surprise that someone tell so.
Experts? I doubt that. They would prefer a continuing N. Korean nuclear weapons program instead? That’s seriously warped judgement.
,I>An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field. Niels Bohr
OK, so bringing the Norks out of the Stone Age and starvation into the modern world won’t benefit them in anyway, and selling their coal on the open market will damage the hearts and minds of freeloading CAGWers, Warmians, and all the other angst-ridden idiots on the Fear of Warmth side of the fence.
Are those people even vaguely aware of the fact that North Koreans use human waste for fertilizer in farming, and as a result, they are riddled with parasites? And this is only one of many issues that abound in North Korea.
No? I mean, I know that they don’t care at all, but if they had to live that way, they might shut up… or not.
They don’t live in the Real World. How does one drive reality into those dormant organs they have for brains….?
Human manure was used in Japan (not much any more), and produced the same parasite problem. My father was based at Cure on the Inland Sea in 1948/49. They were warned to eat only cooked food to avoid infection, as the locals were immune to a greater or lesser degree, but the occupying British, Australians and Americans weren’t. Not nice to get parasites.
Geezums, Sara. If you keep it up with that kind of “stuff” folks are going to decide that you are a rationalist instead of a skeptic.
They must have a great night sky for star watching.
They are living the green dream.
Definitely. The more hardcore in the green blob would require a North Korean lifestyle on everyone.
…A Trump Success With North Korea Would Accelerate Global Warming…
I had wondered what the Left would do if there was peace between North and South Korea on Trump’s watch.
They gave Obama a ‘Nobel Peace Prize’ for doing absolutely nothing. So they will be severely embarrassed if Trump establishes a detente between the two. Of course they would not give him any recognition for this, but what would be their excuse? Now, I think they’ve found it….
The first question that came to my mind is why have we been shipping coal to DPRK since the 1990s if they have so much coal to sell?
The intersection of nevertrump spin with global carbon micromanagement is a new low for green psychosis.
“Accelerate Global Warming”. Need to quantify – how many 0.001 degrees C per century?
So now the climate is more important than peace? Why did John Lennon sing and talk about peace so much then?
Because he obviously wasn’t aware of global warming. You can trust him to be perfectly aligned with liberals, and to sing about climate change if still alive
Opening up world markets to North Korea isn’t going to add much to the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. It’s a non-issue except to those who see any such development in the worst light possible.
If Trump can fix the North Korea problem it will be a great thing for the whole world. Horrific wars must be avoided as much as is possible. Sometimes though, it is not possible to avoid horrific wars. Sometimes circumstances force us to act in our self-interests. Let’s hope Kim Jung Un doesn’t put us in unfortunate circumstances by backing out on the deal. He knows what the deal is: Complete, verifiable denuclearization. Backing out now would not endear him to the world and would only make his precarious position worse.
So if I get this argument, keeping people starving in prison camps is the preferential way to save the planet if you have strong Erlich-ian leanings? Sounds about right,
Somebody actually spent time writing this up and putting it on the internet. What a waste of time and money.
We need to find something else for these people to do.
Yes, Bill, I marvel that people are getting paid/making a living off this kind of refuse. It’s become an epidemic.
Damn the Devil, still finding stuff for the idle to do!
That’s known as “dumping” on the market and bad for business competitors.
When did E&E take a turn towards delusion?
This article from E&E is shallow and riddled with inaccuracies as numerous commenters above have pointed out errors.
There’s extra cost in that while they are paying for the coal now they won’t be able to take delivery of the coal until sometime in the future. If ever.
And any peace there on the Korean peninsula would mean that the chances of a nuclear exchange would be reduced — and a nuclear exchange would certainly cause a sharp drop in global temperatures. Isn’t that what the alarmists want?
The left has an absolute blind hatred for Donald Trump. Anything he does no matter how good it is will be viewed as bad by the left.
Can’t have more screwed up priorities than that.