China chokes on a coal-fired boom

This is what our future will become if we don't somehow find a way to curtail our dependence on goods and services that owe their existence to high inputs of hydrocarbon energy.

A GREAT coal rush is under way across China on a scale not seen anywhere since the 19th century.

Its consequences have been detected half a world away in toxic clouds so big that they can seen from space, drifting across the Pacific to California laden with microscopic particles of chemicals that cause cancer and diseases of the heart and lung.

Nonetheless, the Chinese plan to build no fewer than 500 new coal-fired power stations, adding to some 2,000, most of them unmodernised, that spew smoke, carbon dioxide and sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere.

It is the political fallout of that decision that is likely to challenge the foundations on which Britain and other developed nations have built their climate change policy — even as there are signs that ordinary Chinese citizens are at last rebelling against lives spent in poisonous conditions.

Cloaked in swirling mists of soot particles and smoke, cities such as China’s “coal capital” of Datong are entering the coldest period of winter in which demand for power and heating produces the worst pollution.

It is often darkness at noon in Datong, just 160 miles west of Beijing, where vehicles drive in daytime with their headlights on to grope through the miasma.

One of the four filthiest towns in China, it stands at the heart of the nation’s coal belt in Shanxi province, a region that mines more coal every year than Britain, Russia and Germany combined.

Cancer rates are soaring, child health is a time bomb and the population, many of whom are heavy cigarette smokers, are paying the price for China’s breakneck rush to riches and industrialisation — an estimated 400,000 premature deaths nationwide because of pollution every year.

Oil is prohibitively expensive for China now, so they are using coal. Eventually oil will become prohibitively expensive in the United States as well. When, not if, that happens we will burn everything we can find to keep warm and to provide energy to produce what we want. The only way it could not happen is if we reduced our energy consumption at the same rate that our "clean" hydrocarbon energy depletes (including the increased contribution from renewable energy sources of course). Even that won't help the financially challenged who will not be able to ratchet up their energy expenditures at the drop of a hat. The costs are going to go up. That by itself will reduce consumption. But without an understood agreement by the consumer that there is going to be less for everyone, there will be no way to stop the burning of all of the wood and coal that can be had. As you can see in this article the situation is going to be grim long before the resultant pollutants from this wholesale burning factor into global warming.

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