from King Coal: Reigning in China
George Will

Half of the 6 billion tons of coal burned globally each year is burned in China.
A spokesman for the Sierra Club, which in recent years has helped to block
construction of 139 proposed coal-fired plants in America, says, “This is undermining everything we’ve accomplished.” America, say environmentalists, is
exporting global warming.

Can something really be exported if it supposedly affects the entire planet?
Never mind. America has partners in this crime against nature, if such it is. one
Australian company proposes to build the Cowlitz facility; another has signed
a $60 billion contract to supply Chinese power plants with Australian coal.

The Times says ships — all burning hydrocarbons — hauled about 690 million tons of thermal coal this year, up from 385 million in 2001. China, which imported about 150 million tons this year, was a net exporter of coal until 2009, sending abroad its low-grade coal and importing higher-grade, low-sulfur coal
from, for example, the Powder River Basin of Wyoming and Montana. Because
much of China’s enormous coal reserves is inland, far from coastal factories,
it is sometimes more economical to import American and Australian coal.

Writing in the Atlantic on China’s appetite for coal and possible aptitude for
using the old fuel in new, cleaner ways, James Fallows quotes a Chinese official
saying that the country’s transportation system is the only serious limit on how
fast power companies increase their use of coal. one reason China is building
light-rail systems is to get passenger traffic out of the way of coal trains.

Fallows reports that 15 years from now China expects that 350 million
people will be living in cities that do not exist yet. This will require adding to
China’s electrical system a capacity almost as large as America’s current
capacity. The united States, China, Russia and India have 40 percent of the
world’s population and 60 percent of its coal.