The Change Mariner

China's Boom Adds to Global Warming Problem

NYT

China's rapid economic growth is producing a surge in emissions of greenhouse gases that threatens international efforts to curb global warming, as Chinese power plants burn ever more coal while car sales soar.

Until the last few months, many energy experts and environmentalists said, they had hoped that China's contribution to global warming would be limited. Its state-owned enterprises have become more efficient in their energy use as they compete in an increasingly capitalist economy, and until recently official Chinese statistics had been showing a steep drop in coal production and consumption.

But new figures from Chinese government agencies confirm what energy industry executives had suspected: that coal use has actually been climbing faster in China than practically anywhere else in the world.

To the extent that global warming is caused by humanity, as many scientists believe, this is a serious problem because burning coal at a power plant releases more greenhouse gases than using oil or natural gas to generate the same amount of electricity.

China's rising energy consumption complicates diplomatic efforts to limit emissions of global warming gases. The International Energy Agency in Paris predicts that the increase in greenhouse gas emissions from 2000 to 2030 in China alone will nearly equal the increase from the entire industrialized world.

China is the world's second largest emitter of such gases, after the United States. But China's per-person energy use and greenhouse gas emissions remain far below levels found in richer countries. The emissions are, for example, roughly one-eighth of those per capita in the United States.