Thread: Coal power
View Single Post
Old 01-19-2020, 11:37 AM   #169 (permalink)
JSH
AKA - Jason
 
JSH's Avatar
 
Join Date: May 2009
Location: PDX
Posts: 3,477

Adventure Seeker - '04 Chevy Astro - Campervan
90 day: 17.3 mpg (US)
Thanks: 305
Thanked 2,050 Times in 1,384 Posts
Quote:
Originally Posted by oil pan 4 View Post
Why does communist chinese (always small letters lol) always get a free pass? Where's Greta on this.
1. Their carbon pollution per capita is a fraction of the USA and EU.
2. They are a poor - middle income country
3. Many of those plants are replacing individual homes burning coal in stoves for heat and cooking. One coal plant is way better than thousands of little coal stoves. (Both for local health and climate change)

It is very disingenuous for wealthy counties to put the burden of climate change on the backs of poor and middle income countries. To tell them that they cannot use fossil fuels to develop there economies in the same way we have done and continue to do. When the rich countries of the world cut our carbon emissions back to the level of poor nations we will have cause to lecture them about their emissions.


EDIT: The headline reads "China is Still Building an Insane Number of Coal Plants"

The body says:

" In addition to roughly 1,000 gigawatts of existing coal capacity, China has 121 gigawatts of coal plants under construction, which is more than is being built in the rest of the world combined. But here’s the weird thing—more than half the time, China’s coal plants are just sitting around collecting dust. If China already has more coal power than it needs, why does it keep building new plants?"

Indeed, coal-powered electricity generation in China has flatlined, despite the explosive growth in the number of coal plants. According to Daisy Ren, a doctoral student at Carnegie Mellon who studies the economics of energy policy, China’s coal use is expected to peak around 2020. “We should be concerned about whether China is burning more coal in the future, but increasing its coal capacity is not equivalent to using that much coal,”



When the Chinese government started letting local governments approve coal plants instead of central planning those local governments tripled the number of plants under construction. They approved plants that were not needed as "make work" projects and to drive economic activity in their jurisdiction. No different than the ghost cities that have been build and then never populated.

Last edited by JSH; 01-19-2020 at 11:56 AM..
  Reply With Quote