This article notes how the use of coal, and the polluting effects, by China, dwarfs that of the rest of the world.
All the Coal in China
By Rowan Callick From the May/June 2007 Issue
Cheap and abundant, coal is the energy that powers China’s economy, writes Rowan Callick. But it also may be the world’s worst environmental problem.
The industrial muscle that has built China into the world’s factory relies on three key inputs: first, an army of flexible, low-cost workers; second, ready access to foreign capital and technology; and third, cheap energy, which means coal, the source of two-thirds of China’s total power and 79 percent of its electricity. Most things we buy today seem to be Made in China, and run¬ning through them is a hidden seam of coal.
All the coal in China may be the world’s single biggest environmental problem because, while China’s coal is inexpensive and abundant, it is also pernicious. Coal mining kills thousands of Chinese workers each year, and China burns coal with meth¬ods that both pollute the air and water and vastly increase the volume of climate-warming gases pumped into the atmo¬sphere. But China’s coal is a fact of environmen¬tal and economic life—a particularly potent and unacknowledged fact.
China is by far the world’s top coal producer and consumer, using about 42 percent of the world’s thermal coal for generating power and 48 percent of its metallurgical or coking coal for making steel. It uses more coal than the United States, Europe, and Japan together. Nine out of ten of China’s new power plants run on coal, and somewhere in the country, a new coal-fired power station is being built every seven to ten days.
