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China

China Ramps Up Coal Power Despite Carbon Neutral Pledges (theguardian.com) 80

Posted by msmash from the how-about-that dept.
Local governments in China approved more new coal power in the first three months of 2023 than in the whole of 2021, according to official documents. From a report: The approvals, analysed by Greenpeace, reveal that between January and March this year, at least 20.45 gigawatts of coal power was approved, up from 8.63GW in the same period in 2022. In the whole of 2021, 18GW of coal was approved. A Chinese Communist party (CCP) five-year plan from 2016 had placed a heavy emphasis on reducing the use of coal and developing clean energy sources. In 2020 Xi Jinping, China's leader, pledged that the country would become carbon neutral by 2060. This prompted an era of reduced coal power approvals as local governments sought to keep their local economies in check with Beijing's priorities. A rise in coal power approvals came in 2020 when the five-year plan came to an end, as local governments anticipated even tighter restrictions on coal expansion in the next round. But in 2021, China suffered huge power outages, leading to a dramatic shift in the CCP's energy priorities. In September the price of electricity soared as factories reopened to service global demand as the rest of the world emerged from the Covid-19 pandemic. But the government had capped prices, so many power plants reduced output rather than operated at a loss.
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China Ramps Up Coal Power Despite Carbon Neutral Pledges More

China Ramps Up Coal Power Despite Carbon Neutral Pledges

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  • We should give them more money (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 28, 2023 @04:18PM (#63483932)

    It's worked so well so far...

    • To build a coal powered electric plant isn't all that unusual. If we're going to tsk tsk, lets start with coal in China actually being subsidized - as I understand it they're rewarded for using local resources, meaning coal.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      give? what give?

      the US sells China their money and China buys it. its called debt.

    • Saying I told you so just seems pedantic when it comes to the lies CCP utters and the absolute cock-gobbling that envirokooks are willing to swallow from the Chinese.

  • The easiest way to tell the Beijing State is lying (Score:5, Insightful)

    by He Who Has No Name ( 768306 ) on Friday April 28, 2023 @04:19PM (#63483934)

    Answer: they only lie.

    • I'm shocked- SHOCKED! - to hear that our good friends would lie to us. They promised they would not lie! How can this be? Perhaps if we give them more money they will stop lying.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      I wonder if Greenpeace is being entirely truthful though. Is this like when German built 5 new coal plants, but actually closed 8 for a total of -3?

      They can both be lying, although no country can really lie about emissions because we can detect them from space and with atmospheric sampling.

  • "Rhetoric? China is a dictatorship FFS"

    https://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=22860876&cid=63478030

  • Ya, but ... (Score:3)

    by fahrbot-bot ( 874524 ) on Friday April 28, 2023 @04:37PM (#63483964)

    Maybe it's that "clean coal" some people are always going on about. /s

    [ Maybe it's "super clean coal" that actually reduces pollution -- we don't know! :-) ]

  • Energy = quality of life (Score:5, Interesting)

    by hdyoung ( 5182939 ) on Friday April 28, 2023 @04:40PM (#63483972)
    and economic development. AGW is totally real, and we need to do something about it. But, the second and third worlds have an extremely valid point that’s never really been addressed: the west released MASSIVE amounts of greenhouse gasses while they were developing and getting rich. Why should the rest of the planet be doomed to live in huts and die early while we sit here in our large air-conditioned houses sipping champagne?

    To me, the fair solution to this is pretty clear: the west needs to help the rest of the world. Share technology and yes, resources. This way, they can continue to develop WITHOUT burning mountains of coal and oceans of oil. I’m a realist of course. This is absolutely NOT GOING TO HAPPEN.

    Humanity is going to burn every liter of oil that it can extract, and every ounce of coal it can dig up, in addition to consuming as much solar, wind, and nuclear as it can manage to put up. Environmental consequences be damned. Short-term thinking is winning and we will deal with the problems at a later date.

    In an extremely perverse way, I hope that the AGW deniers COUGH*IDIOTS*COUGH are correct and global warming is a big nothingburger. A century of science has concluded otherwise.

    We need to be developing the science and engineering required to do real-life geoengineering. Our species is going to need it next century. I’m done listening to the people who whine about “noooOOOoo geoengineering could mess up the planet. Didn’t you see Snowpiercer?”. We already already messed up the planet. That ship sailed 20 years ago.

    • Re:Energy = quality of life (Score:5, Insightful)

      by poptix ( 78287 ) on Friday April 28, 2023 @05:25PM (#63484058) Homepage

      Modern energy sources were not available when the west went through the industrial revolution.

      China manufactures most of our solar panels, batteries, charge controllers, etc. We've already shared the technology, they're using it, just not as fast as they promised.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by quantum_cyborg ( 137005 )

        And they are massively expanding their use of solar, nuclear, and other renewables, the percentage of those power sources are increasing compared to the whole. The problem is because the percentage of those started off so low, even if they are expanding those by an order of magnitude, which is risky and costly, it still can't meet their needs from their rate of growth alone. They basically had no choice but to use fossil fuels, and coal in particular because they have less available sources of natural gas.

        T

        • The Chinese aren't dumb, if they could build and use cleaner sources of power for comparable cost, they would have done it.

          It's dumb to sell out the future. We're dumb together.

          • I wouldn't call it dumb, but we collectively are making bad decisions because humans are bad at judging this type of problems. It's the tragedy of the commons, it happens in virtually every domain, and we have never been able to solve this.

            I don't think anyone can argue that cheap energy isn't beneficial to everyone. And it's impossible to hold back anyone from using cheap available sources of energy to better their lives, to pull themselves out of poverty. No country is able to do that. We are inadvertentl

      • Re:Energy = quality of life (Score:4, Insightful)

        by TheWorstTakes ( 10347040 ) on Friday April 28, 2023 @06:06PM (#63484110)

        China isn't exactly slacking when it comes to solar. They generate more solar power than any other nation by a mile and a half, and their solar capacity is growing at a record pace. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] https://www.reuters.com/world/... [reuters.com]

        And yet, solar still accounts for a measly 3.1% of their electricity generation. People seem to grossly underestimate just how much power the heavy industry needed to sustain a country of over a billion people draws. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

        • Don't forget that a lot of their heavy industry is also to supply many of our products. So they have the heavy industry for like 2B people, not just 1.4. Europe especially is kind of greenwashing themselves that way.

          • Europe especially is kind of greenwashing themselves that way.

            Exactly the point I made in another comment. Western nations haven't so such cut their greenhouse gas emissions, as they have exported them to China.

        • What's their per capita generation of renewables vs western countries?

  • The West relies on China for cheap manufactured goods, and the factories those cheap manufactured goods will be made in are powered by coal. It doesn't matter if the world's most arrogant continent (I'll let you decide which one) promises to hold in some of its CO2 farts, and it doesn't matter that they're wagging their finger at China for not doing the same. They're still tweeting on Chinese-made cell phones, wearing Chinese-made clothes, cooking with Chinese-made kitchenware, and sleeping in Chinese-made

  • Foolish. (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Eunomion ( 8640039 )
    They might think doing both green and dirty is some kind of win-win, but it will just trap large parts of their economy in costly obsolescence when the developed world has moved on. And it will naturally be a much bigger competitor to their own domestic renewables than to foreign renewable ventures, so they'll be shooting themselves in the foot as a supplier of green tech abroad.

  • Aren't they buying a lot more electric cars? So they could in theory build coal power plants but shift to EVs and still end up neutral. They didn't say they were reducing their CO2 output, just shooting for neutral.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by jonadab ( 583620 )
      Electric cars that you charge on a mostly-coal-fired power grid, is *more* polluting than gasoline-powered cars, not less, and certainly not neutral.

  • Development of zero carbon infrastructure is difficult especially when you have a manufacturing heavy economy like China.
    What is required is effective solutions for electrical power and industrial heat.
    As the west has de-industrialised we've been coasting on an energy grid and plant build and paid for by the pre-boomers generation. If we reindustrialise we will need significantly more power.
    Industry can't operates effectively on intermittent power, numerous processes require slow starts and stops and long o

  • Not really anything more to say.

  • Quite amazing to read these comments.

    China alone, if the theory is correct, is on its own emitting enough CO2 to destroy human civilization on earth. Around one third of global emissions and rising. All the evidence is they intend to keep on increasing their emissions. All the evidence is that what they care about is economic growth, and they will emit as much as it takes to grow as fast as they can. At the moment they mine and burn more coal than the rest of the world put together, and the story record

    • Agree about a lot of things you say, but I believe that people need to put their house in order first, before trying to fix other countries.

      The West (USA, Europe) offshored a lot of its mining, manufacturing and industry capabilities to countries like China because they didn't want to deal with the impacts of those:
      - if you want to produce things in a "clean" manner, it costs more
      - if you want to produce things and pay people a decent wage, it costs more

      But if the west didn't find a way to produce those thi

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Budenny ( 888916 )

        "But if the west didn't find a way to produce those things cleanly, and still keeping them cheap, even though we were more advanced at the time, why should we expect a country lagging behind in terms of technological advancement and environmental awareness, to do better?"

        The question is not what we should expect. Its not about attitudes or feelings at all.

        There is a country which is, if the theory is correct, is single handedly destroying human civilization. Yet people in this forum keep on making these k

        • There is a country which is, if the theory is correct, is single handedly destroying human civilization. Yet people in this forum keep on making these kinds of excuses for it.

          This is not about making excuses. This is about explaining that most of what they do is:
          - either for other countries, like ours (assuming you are from Europe or North America). Take the mining of rare earths, which is a dirty process in itself: the US or even Europe have rare earths deposits, which they were exploiting. Actually, before 1970, the US was the main provider of rare earths. We decided to stop exploiting those mines because we couldn't do it in a clean and at the same time cheap manner. But we d

  • What this news means is that we here in the West must stop driving cars altogether and never eat meat. Also, it would be helpful to not eat at all.

  • Coal has strategic value for China. China relies on places like the middle east for oil and gas. This must flow through choke points like the the straits of Hormuz and the Malaca straits to reach China, and the US could easily block these routes if hostilities with China happened. Also, they only have very limited ability to get oil and gas by pipeline from Russia and Kazakhstan. Coal is the only domestic safe source of energy for China for many many years to come. It is a strategic security decision fo

  • That carbon taxes, climate accords, and pushes to so called green energy are nothing but a scam. China knows it, and whether it is responsible for perpetrating all of those, or even part, or not it IS taking advantage of it.

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