Citizen Power

In Tennessee, three days before Christmas, a billion tons of toxic coal ash slurry broke through its damn, knocked down houses, poisoned water systems, destroyed vegetation, and covered over 300 acres of land. In sheer volume alone, this disaster is more than 48 times worse than the Exxon-Valdez oil spill. This was a catastrophe not only for the people living there, but this disaster continues (a post to follow on this). Could this disaster finally be the end of coal power?

Unfortunately, no. The following plan from China, if they go through with it, will probably finish off all life on earth as we know it. That’s because coal puts out more C02 than any power source we currently use (and we are already over the ’safe’ C02 level of 350 ppm).

This photo was scanned from the recent issue of Science Ilustrated.

The caption/story states:

“In the heavily polluted industrial city of Changzhi in northern China, a laborer salvages lumps of coal from a cinder dump site. With oil more expensive than ever, China hopes to convert its coal reserves into oil through a controversial method known as coal-to-liquid. Critics say the process releases twice as much carbon dioxide as petroleum refining and uses large amounts of water. Nevertheless, the government is completing construction on a major coal-to-liquid complex on the grasslands of Inner Mongolia that, when it begins operating later this year, is expected to annually turn 3.5 million metric tons of coal into a million tons of oil products such as diesel. That amounts to about 20,000 barrels a day, a drop in the bucket compared with the 7.2 million barrels China consumes daily. But officials hope to ramp up production to 50 million metric tons of coal per year by 2020.”

They won’t need to bother, because increasing use of coal might kill us all off. And it’s not just China that is guilty of using coal of course; it’s the United States, Australia, Canada, and even countries like Sweden that finance coal plants. A recent article in Climate Progress points out the danger of this future:

“The Canberra Times/AFP has the alarming news:

China is aiming to increase its coal production by about 30 per cent by 2015 to meet its energy needs, the Government has announced, in a move likely to fuel concerns over global warming.

Land and Resources Ministry chief planner Hu Cunzhi said the Government planned to increase annual output to more than 3.3 billion tonnes by 2015.

That is up from the 2.54 billion tonnes produced in 2007, according to the ministry.”

In short, from 2007 to 2015, China will increase its coal production by an amount equal to two-thirds of the entire coal consumption of the United States — an amount that surpasses all of the coal consumed today in Europe, Eurasia, the Middle East, Africa, and Central and South America.

Such is the legacy of 8 years of the Bush administration blocking all national and international action on climate change, and indeed actively working to undermine international negotiations by creating a parallel do-nothing track for countries like China. As Chinese officials have told me, we gave them the cover to accelerate emissions growth.

Some might claim a different president would never have been able to get China on a different path. But if Al Gore had been elected picked by the Supreme Court in 2000, [instead of Bush] . . . . China would not be planning for its 2015 coal production to be triple that of current U.S. coal production.”

Are we doomed? Probably, if they really increase their coal use this much.    Coal is filthy. It doesn’t just release C02, it released soot and particulates, and leads to all kinds of health problems such as black lung disease and asthma. THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS CLEAN COAL.

(see “What will make Obama a great president, Part 2: A climate deal with China”

The story continues:

“Annual production of natural gas would more than double to 160 billion cubic metres by 2015, while that of crude oil would increase by 7 per cent to more than 200billion tonnes, Mr Hu said.

The Government would set up reserves of oil and coal as part of its efforts to ensure national energy security, Mr Hu said at a news conference.

China began building four strategic oil reserve facilities on its east coast this decade, and two of these are now in operation.

The country’s energy consumption expanded by an average annual rate of 5.4 per cent between 1979 and 2007, the official Xinhua news agency said yesterday, which fuelled average annual economic growth of 9.8 per cent.

China depends on coal for about 70 per cent of its energy.

Its thundering growth has meant the country has become one of the two biggest emitters of greenhouse gases, alongside the United States.

China said coal, the cheapest and most plentiful source of fuel in the country, would remain its main energy source, despite the impact global warming had already had on the country.

China has repeatedly defended its use of coal, pointing to its efforts to develop renewable energies while blaming industrialised countries for the bulk of the greenhouse gases that are already doing the damage. It also emphasises the per capita emissions of greenhouse gases of China, the world’s most populous country with more than 1.3 billion people, are far lower than those of the US and other developed nations.”

That Chinese argument, I think, can now be officially labeled the insanity defense (see Hadley Center: “Catastrophic” 5-7°C warming by 2100 on current emissions path). Yes, the industrialized countries must sharply reduce their emissions — but absent a reversal of this Chinese coal policy, catastrophic climate impacts are inevitable.”

China and other highly populated countries also need to do a few things: invest in other forms of energy that don’t pollute so much, stop pumping C02 into the air, stop using coal entirely!,  and get a handle on their increasing population. At least China is trying to do that, but other countries need to join the population decrease effort too.

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