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- inspecality, on 11/19/2007, -0/+9I'm writing a research paper on environmental economics, and one article I used was about China. From my source coal consumption in China rose 800mil tons from 2000 to 2005, and it now accounts for 70% of China's energy needs. Of course, it produces sulphur dioxide and now 1/3 of China is affected by acid rain and over 300,000 Chinese die each year from respiratory diseases.
- manicallday, on 11/19/2007, -1/+8Coal addiction hinders climate cleanup
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The cheap and abundant fossil fuel powers growth in Asia's developing nations and adds to global warming.
By Alan Zarembo, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
November 18, 2007
Coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel, is the crack cocaine of the developing world.
It is the inexpensive and plentiful fuel powering the rising economies of Asia -- and because of that, it has become one of the most intractable problems in combating global warming.
Even as the political will and grass-roots support to rein in rising carbon dioxide levels is growing, a large segment of the world is using more coal than ever.
The addiction threatens to undercut the landmark work of the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which shared the Nobel Peace Prize with former Vice President Al Gore for work on global warming.
In a series of reports this year, the panel outlined the causes and consequences of global warming, along with solutions to avoid its most serious effects. The final installment of the panel's report -- a synthesis of its key findings approved by delegates from 140 countries -- was released Saturday.
The panel's road map for action hinges on all the world's biggest carbon polluters significantly reducing their emissions over the next 20 years.
But the reality is that for many countries, coal has been too good to give up.
"A gigaton of carbon here, a gigaton there -- we've got a disjunction between the rhetoric and the reality," said David Wheeler, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development, a nonprofit research group in Washington that recently compiled a database of the world's 50,000 power plants.
Leading the coal spree is China, which has more than doubled its CO2 emissions from coal since 2000 to more than 2.7 billions tons a year, according to the database.
Over the last eight years, China has built 603 coal-fired generators -- 64% of the new generators installed worldwide. India has added 133generators, according to the database.
They're not the only coal addicts.
In raw numbers, China has merely caught up to the United States, according to the database. In Europe, which has led the world in greenhouse gas reductions, coal use is expected to creep up in the next several years -- driven by rising oil and natural gas prices.
But a recent analysis by MIT climate experts found that even if the U.S. and Europe could somehow stop all their carbon emissions, the developing countries are on pace to create a climate crisis on their own.
Michael Wara, a Stanford University researcher who studies the emerging markets for greenhouse gases, said: "In 20 years, if India and China aren't on board, the game is lost."
Part of the problem with coal is its chemistry.
Because it contains more carbon atoms than other fossil fuels, burning it produces more carbon dioxide for each megawatt-hour of electricity -- roughly 25% more than oil and 66% more than natural gas.
It's cheap and abundant, and as Leon E. Clarke, an economist at the Joint Global Change Research Institute at the University of Maryland, added: "Unlike conventional oil and gas, it can be treated as virtually inexhaustible over the coming century."
For many nations, the surplus of coal holds strategic allure as well because it allows them to reduce dependence on their other addiction: oil.
Coal, which now accounts for 39% of the carbon dioxide produced from fossil fuels, will soon surpass oil as the top emissions source -- and keep expanding its lead over the next two decades, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
China and the U.S. each account for about a quarter of the world's carbon emissions. In the next decade, China is expected to move well ahead of the United States, and India will move past Russia into third place.
Since 1997, China has increased its coal-burning capacity from 145,000 megawatts to 370,000 megawatts, or about 28% of the global capacity, according to the power plant database.
Coal accounts for 77% of China's power capacity, compared with 42% worldwide and 48% in the United States.
Weaning countries with that level of coal dependence is not expected to be easy.
The U.N. panel has said that worldwide carbon emissions must peak in the next decade and fall by at least 50% by 2050 to limit temperature rise to about 3 degrees Fahrenheit and prevent serious drought, sea level rise and ecological chaos.
Its main solution is placing a cap on global emissions and charging polluters for every ton of carbon dioxide beyond that point. The carbon emissions would be bought and sold on a pollution market.
As the cap was lowered, the price of polluting would go up, eventually making it cheaper for polluters to shut down their old plants and build cleaner ones or add systems that would capture and store their pollution.
The panel estimated that reducing emissions to acceptable levels would cost about 3% of the world's gross domestic product over the next two decades.
Europe has already created such a market, but other countries, particularly China, India and the United States, have rejected calls to cap their emissions.
China and India have argued that their buildup of power plants is to provide their citizens the benefits of development long enjoyed by the industrialized world.
The West uses much more energy per person, and its emissions over the last 150 years are still the main cause of the present concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
The United States has refused to endorse any plan that would not force developing countries to cut their emissions.
The result is a political gridlock on carbon emissions.
One possible solution is to rely on economic pressure from the U.N. panel's carbon market proposal.
If the price of carbon pollution got high enough, it could make it cost-effective for a company to go to China and clean up someone else's coal power plant. That reduction in emissions could then be sold on the carbon market for a profit.
It is already possible on a small scale to capture carbon dioxide emissions and pump them into underground geological formations, though it is considered too expensive now to implement on a commercial scale.
Another possibility is a process known as integrated gasification, which converts coal into a cleaner-burning gas, capturing emissions in the process.
Coal plants in China and India could eventually be retrofitted with such systems.
"We need a bolt-on solution for those existing plants," said Stanford's Wara. "It's going to be very difficult to tell those people to shut down those plants."
Some experts said a more forceful approach was needed with China and India, or for that matter the United States.
A proposal by the European Union has raised the possibility of taxing imports from countries that don't agree to mandatory emissions, said MIT economist John M. Reilly.
China and India are hardly immune from the effects of greenhouse gases.
Rising sea levels could eventually threaten coastal cities, and melting glaciers in the Himalayas are already threatening water supplies.
In addition, dirty air is already taking a toll on health in many Chinese cities.
But there is no way to determine what level of climate problems will drive developing countries to clean up.
The countries "are worried about the effects of climate change, but they're even more worried about slowing economic growth," said Stephen H. Schneider, a Stanford climatologist.
alan.zarembo@latimes.com - SeventhSon, on 11/19/2007, -4/+11My name is Dave, and I'm a coalaholic. I just can't live without coalahol!
- tmbrwolf19, on 11/19/2007, -1/+7Most environmental watchdogs advocate for nuclear. The issue is long term storage of spent nuclear material, because as it stands, there is no where for it to be stored indefinitely. Almost all of the current short term storage facilities are full. Until that issue is addressed, building more plants is just silly.
- tmbrwolf19, on 11/19/2007, -5/+11"Khandekar and the "Friends of Science"
Listed as a member of the "Scientific Advisory Board" for a Calgary-based global warming skeptic organization called the "Friends of Science" (FOS). In a January 28, 2007 article in the Toronto Star, the President of the FOS admitted that about one-third of the funding for the FOS is provided by the oil industry. In an August, '06 Globe and Mail feature , the FOS was exposed as being funded in part by the oil and gas sector and hiding the fact that they were. According to the Globe and Mail, the oil industry money was funnelled through the Calgary Foundation charity, to the University of Calgary and then put into an education trust for the FOS.
Khandekar and the NRSP
Listed as an “Allied Expert” for a Canadian group called the "Natural Resource Stewardship Project," (NRSP) a lobby organization that refuses to disclose it's funding sources. The NRSP is led by executive director Tom Harris and Dr. Tim Ball. An Oct. 16, 2006 CanWest Global news article on who funds the NRSP, it states that "a confidentiality agreement doesn't allow him [Tom Harris] to say whether energy companies are funding his group."
DeSmog recently uncovered information that two of the three Directors on the board of the Natural Resources Stewardship Project are senior executives of the High Park Advocacy Group, a Toronto based lobby firm that specializes in “energy, environment and ethics.”
Research background
Khandekar is a retired Environment Canada scientist. According to a search of 22,000 academic journals, Khandekar has published 19 pieces of research in peer-reviewed journals, mainly in the area of El Nino and climate. "
Hmm... I smelll conflict of interest. Therefor take that article with a grain of salt. - masterm1nd, on 11/19/2007, -3/+9Maybe you should not be against nuclear power or economical/technological advancement then.
- manicallday, on 11/19/2007, -1/+5bugmenot.com
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Did this login work out for you? - jjk7288, on 11/19/2007, -1/+5More like "required registration prevents digging of article."
- Jossarian, on 11/19/2007, -0/+3In 1982 U.S. coal-burning power plants, which collectively consumed 616 million tons of coal, released 801 tons of uranium and 1,971 tons of thorium into the environment -- virtually unnoticed.
Roughly 11,371 pounds of the uranium was U-235.
Moreover, global combustion of 2,800 million tons of coal that year released 8,960 tons of thorium and 3,640 tons of uranium, of which 51,700 pounds was U-235.
Ironically, in 1982, 111 U.S. nuclear power plants used 540 tons of nuclear fuel to generate electricity. Thus, "the release of nuclear components from coal combustion far exceeds the entire U.S. consumption of nuclear fuels," Gabbard notes in the fall issue of the OAK RIDGE NATIONAL LABORATORY REVIEW.
See this:
http://uncensored.co.nz/archives/2006/06/28/the-ra ...
http://www.ornl.gov/info/ornlreview/rev26-34/text/ ...
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1200/is_n14 ...
/Joss - tmbrwolf19, on 11/19/2007, -1/+4Why not subsidize developing nations to invest in clean technology rather then coal. You over look the fact that they probably can't afford good coal either, and are probably using coal with a very high sulfur content. This cause widespread health problems, acid rain, damages crops, poisons water, and generally just really sucks for everyone involved. Its great that they will be able to turn on the lights, but the other consequences are worse. Simply put, coal isn't a solution.
- inactive, on 11/19/2007, -1/+4How is nuclear dangerous? In all the years we've been using nuclear in the United States there's only been one accident and nobody died as a result of it. What did happen as a result of that accident is that tens of billions of dollars have been spent researching technology to make sure another accident like it can never happen again in an American reactor. Every nuclear engineer I've talked to tells me they think we spend *too* much money and effort in redundant safety systems for modern reactors, but the peace of mind is worth the effort, IMO. Add to that the fact that between Canada, Australia and the United States we control about half the uranium in the world. No need for energy dependence. No need for coal pollution. No need for mountaintop removal mining. No reason that we're suffering EPA mercury contamination numbers like this:
http://home.comcast.net/~jackson.robert.r/EPA.jpg
BTW, I'd have linked to the EPA site, but they stopped publishing that data in 2004 and took it all off their site. Crazy scientists. If God didn't want us burning coal he wouldn't have hidden so much of it under our mountains. - norman619, on 11/19/2007, -0/+3Hey Mr. Ignorant, Al Gore is all about Human Caused Global Warming
- aussieNickuss, on 11/19/2007, -0/+3There is a point where you can no longer offset carbon emissions. Since coal power is the largest source of CO2, you would have to completely cut carbon emissions from all other sources which is nigh impossible....and then you still wouldn't offset 100% of coal power.
- mattsw84, on 11/19/2007, -0/+3Oil addiction, coal addiction, just call it what it is. Carbon addiction.
- btsr7414, on 11/19/2007, -0/+3Hmm ... I wonder if the oil companies also paid off the scientists who wrote the peer reviewed papers cited. [/sarcasm] Way to attack the messenger rather than the message. Argumentum ad hominem (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem).
- Shorties, on 11/19/2007, -5/+7How do either of you know this...
- sremick, on 11/19/2007, -0/+21) You seem to be under the impression that because something is the cheapest, it's the best. Sometimes cheaper != better. That $100 washer that will cost you $50/yr in energy costs might not be the better deal than the $300 washer that will cost you $10/yr. You have to look at the cost of use, not the upfront cost to purchase. With coal we're faced with an upfront cost-per-energy-unit to be so cheap that no one looks at the repercussions of using that energy source and how it's costing them in other ways.
2) For new technology to become cheaper, it needs early adopters to increase demand. Which means people who use other criteria than raw price to make their decisions. - WhyMe, on 11/19/2007, -0/+2I was being sarcastic. :)
- Math, on 11/20/2007, -0/+2Travelling around China last year, most of the country was covered in a smog, even far away from the cities. They use coal for more than just electricity. In all the villages it was was getting used in a lot of the houses for heating and cooking. Its a beautiful country, just a little strange to be in a constant grey haze.
- norman619, on 11/19/2007, -4/+6So does all the biased and misrepresented data you guys use.
- inactive, on 11/19/2007, -5/+7The 151 coal plants in production now in the USA will invalidate every effort to clean up the air:
http://www.inhabitat.com/2007/09/07/coal-will-dest ... - norman619, on 11/19/2007, -1/+3Why not ask what France and other NUCLEAR powered countries are doing withe their waste?
- ripple123, on 11/19/2007, -1/+3Hi Dave.
- darnit, on 11/19/2007, -0/+2http://www.bugmenot.com/view/www.latimes.com
- WhyMe, on 11/19/2007, -3/+5We cannot use coal, it pollutes. Nuclear power is too dangerous. Burning wood pollutes.
Good Lord no matter what we do we kill the planet. I think we should all just curl up in a ball, suck our thumbs and get it over with. - masterm1nd, on 11/19/2007, -1/+2Yup, which would actually be the best solution 300 years ago. But with the exponential growth of technology today, if we don't shut things down, we will be able to control the temperature of the earth from a wristwatch in 80 years (just to be safe, probably more like 30 years). Plus the ball will be rolling on extraterrestrial inhabitance. Rather than dooming us to possible obliteration with no means to do anything about it.
- btsr7414, on 11/19/2007, -1/+2This guy is being dugg up? This place is really going down hill.
- hammerattack, on 11/19/2007, -0/+1For the scientific illiterati who are easily scared by this kind of cut&paste propaganda, let me put this into perspective.
Uranium and thorium are very common elements in the Earth's crust. The concentrations found coal are slightly lower than in granite (countertops), ordinary soil (like where your crops are grown), brick (like you make your home from), or aggregate (like sidewalks and streets use). The concentration of U235 in coal is 9.1 parts per billion. The concentration of U235 in ordinary seawater is 3 parts per billion. (And we didn't put it there, so don't even start.) All forms of Uranium and Thorium are mildly radioactive. (The stuff they put in bombs is highly refined, and is still only moderately radioactive.) You get higher radiation doses sitting in front of a CRT computer monitor, having your teeth x-rayed by the dentist or standing near a microwave oven than get from a lifetime of exposure to trace elements being downwind of a coal plant.
That last quote is rich: nuclear power plants consume very little fuel to do their job. Given the overall abundance of uranium in the earth's crust (not as an ore, but as a trace element), and given how this exact manner of fear mongering has prevented the widespread construction of nuclear power plants in the last 40 years, why would it be surprising or even notable?
If you want to be scared by something, try this: environmentalist scare mongering is preventing the construction of newer and cleaner supercritical coal fired plants. This means that older dirtier plants have to be run longer and harder to keep up with demand. It also means we're having to scrounge more coal up to feed this demand. - inactive, on 11/19/2007, -4/+5Sorry guys but if I could sterilize humanity instantly; I would...
- masterm1nd, on 11/19/2007, -0/+1Ok, you can do that, but you have to be responsible for the people who then do not get to eat as a result.
- p0ss, on 11/19/2007, -5/+6Anyone got a link that doesn't require registration?
- pjr12345, on 11/22/2007, -0/+0I think I'll go throw another log on the fire!
- Veon, on 11/19/2007, -0/+0Here's another article though that says China is aiming towards cleaner energy
http://www.planetsave.com/blog/2007/11/15/china-po ... - masterm1nd, on 11/19/2007, -2/+2/sarcasm
/I hope - masterm1nd, on 11/19/2007, -2/+2I know nothing about this, but why couldn't you dump it off on a neighboring planet as a last resort. Or as a first resort, why can't you just make more proper storage facilities, I mean, if you say the whole earth depends on it, I don't see what is stopping more storage space from going up? Can't be space, can't be money, can't be people, what is the hold up?
- masterm1nd, on 11/19/2007, -1/+1I am addicted to living.
- inactive, on 11/19/2007, -2/+2I read that as "cool" addiction.
- pjr12345, on 11/22/2007, -0/+0If we can raise this number, as well as the numbers from other such causes, then considering their one-child policy, we might not have to fight these rotten commies in the next ten to twenty years.
- climateHeretic, on 11/19/2007, -2/+1Spoke in true Green. Pay more for Green Tech! Come on, you really think the products labeled "Green" cost more to produce? The green gouge as I like to call it takes advantage of the AGW mindset to increase consumer spending and manufacturing profits. I might add are all GREEN products are produced by carbon based energy. It is replacing New and Improved. Smelt iron with a solar panel some time and tell me how it works. You cannot manufacturer yourself a carbon reduced society.
- masterm1nd, on 11/19/2007, -2/+1...develop and grow to a point where they can use cleaner technologies and will have more than likely invented more cleaner technologies as well.
- vikingcoder, on 11/19/2007, -1/+0Look at all the scientific data, not just the regional & out-of-context bits that support your beliefs.
- hammerattack, on 11/19/2007, -2/+1Boorish! I really wish you AGW whackjobs would update your propaganda techniques. This ***** really only works on the most ignorant people, and hasn't even been particularly effective since Joseph Goebbels's used in during WWII.
Nobody is addicted to coal. When's the last time you even ingested it? It just so happens to be one of the most effective natural resources for powering human activity. That's why so much of it is used in the US. Find an effective alternative that is as cheap, and energy companies will stop using it. It's really that simple people. - JusticeAK, on 11/19/2007, -10/+8Global warming is a great scam.
- btsr7414, on 11/19/2007, -12/+10http://www.friendsofscience.org/assets/files/docum ...
This is a summary of peer reviewed research which tempers the current man made global warming hysteria. Before you digg me down, please read this (and if you are digging me down without reading it, please stop and think about why you are doing so). There is no "consensus" as asserted by many of the environmental extremists. - norman619, on 11/19/2007, -6/+4They want us to start living like the Amish.
- Kdurrty, on 11/19/2007, -7/+4I don't think it's fair to say a country cannot use it's own natural resources how they want to. Just look at America: how do you think we became one of the top Countries in the world at one point? Also, alternative and cleaner technologies such as solar power are most of the time too expensive for a developing country to afford. By forcing regulations on what natural resources a country can use, we hinder their ability to develop and grow.
- macbookpromat, on 11/19/2007, -7/+4I was always one to believe that Human caused global warming wasn't a real problem and just now I've learned that all those debates I've had with classmates, I was pretty much right all along. Honestly from the bottom of my heart thank you.
- kushed, on 11/19/2007, -4/+1Have you SUCK DICK for coal? HUH?
- masterm1nd, on 11/19/2007, -5/+2It's not, not a real problem, It's just a very very tiny percentage of the problem. In other words, it is proportionately a distraction and mis-prioritization.
- norman619, on 11/19/2007, -7/+3Look at the scientific data.
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