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Guest essay by Eric Worrall
While China publicly demands the USA fulfil Obama’s Paris Agreement pledges, and makes a big deal of their conversion to green energy, behind the scenes the Chinese Belt and Road initiative is starting to look like a gigantic coal plant construction exercise.
Why Is China Placing A Global Bet On Coal?
Steve Inskeep, Ashley Westerman
April 29, 20191:42 PM ETChina, known as the world’s biggest polluter, has been taking dramatic steps to clean up and fight climate change.
So why is it also building hundreds of coal-fired power plants in other countries?
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Xi took the highly unusual step, for him, of meeting with international journalists, during which he repeated the slogan that he is committed to “open, clean and green development.”
Yet China’s overseas ventures include hundreds of electric power plants that burn coal, which is a significant emitter of the carbon scientifically linked to climate change. 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.
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A visit by NPR on Saturday to one of the plants, the Huaneng Beijing thermal power station, showed that it now burns natural gas — still a contributor to climate change but overall considered cleaner.
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But the Chinese engineers, metalworkers and laborers who built coal-fired power plants must be kept employed. And, Cunningham says, “many are going abroad.” They are building energy projects for developing nations, largely as part of China’s Belt and Road Initiative.
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Chinese officials were ready to answer such concerns at their Belt and Road Forum. “We’re not intending to transfer pollution to other countries,” said Chen Wenling, chief economist at the China Center for International Economic Exchanges in Beijing. “We’re trying to create development opportunities.“
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Read more: https://www.npr.org/2019/04/29/716347646/why-is-china-placing-a-global-bet-on-coal
That nice clean eco-friendly Huaneng gas plant in Beijing – NPR forgot to ask where they get their gas from.
There is a good chance the Huaneng plant still indirectly burns coal. China have invested heavily in coal to gas plants, so they can keep the economic benefits of burning coal, but shift most of the pollution from burning the coal away from major population centres.
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“China, known as the world’s biggest polluter, has been taking dramatic steps to clean up
and fight climate change”Fixed that! I suspect that Steve and Ashley at NPR don’t know the difference between air pollution and CO2. Which wouldn’t be at all surprising, given that the puppet masters have a vested interest in concatenating the two to help in keeping the public alarmed.
China will eventually clean up coal… but just enough so that they can breathe again.
Coal “scrubbing” has only a small effect on CO2 emissions…it makes CO2 emissions slightly WORSE due to the energy costs of scrubbing. NPR is lying here when it implies that China will use coal in a CO2 responsible way…soon. THERE IS NO economical way to do that…and NPR knows it. It’s a deliberate lie.
Why lie in this case?
Our leftist press cannot run one news story without lying or politically slanting fragments of truth. It’s all Propaganda Press: NPR, CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, NBC, and all the big newspapers (dying… but not fast enough). Their liberal audiences require FAKE NEWS to be happy. Hearing the truth would cause their audiences to have “cognitive dissonance” seizures en masse.
China’s CO2 emissions will continue to accelerate (not just rise) for a few more decades…then level off around 2060 (if their nuclear program keeps pace).
Combine these emissions with those from India and Southeast Asia, and global CO2 emissions in 2050 will be well above 2 times current levels.
NPR is behaving like a collection of useful idiots (the Authoritarian Socialist type useful idiots). If NPR really believes that China cares about CC/CAGW they are CLUELESS idiots as well.
After 30 years, why isn’t there a consensus on how much warming CO2 causes?
Because CO2 does not cause warming, perhaps?
Yes, that is so far the only consensus from all citizens of the world.
China is replacing huge numbers of dirty old coal plants with more efficient and less polluting coal plants, primarily to deal with pollution.
China has been reducing the share of coal in electrcity generation for some years now: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EG.ELC.COAL.ZS?locations=CN
European and US per capita CO2 emissions are 2-3 times higher than Chinese.