The NYTimes had
this article about Chinese use of coal to power their economic boom on Sunday (sorry, free registration required). With the pollution from Chinese smokestacks causing widespread illness among its population and even reaching the western coast of the U.S., the issue is beginning to garner international attention. In the short term, the Chinese government wants to try curbing sulfur compounds which cause respiratory illness and acid rain. However, although it wasn't the primary focus of the article, what I took away is that China will become
the major nation to contend with (after the U.S.) in reducing carbon dioxide emissions.
Of course, the "benefit" of the sulfur is that it helps slow global warming by deflecting the sun back into space. If the Chinese scrub the sulfur from their emissions, but continue releasing the CO2, global warming will accelerate.
But the cooling effect from sulfur is short-lived. By contrast, the carbon dioxide emanating from Chinese coal plants will last for decades, with a cumulative warming effect that will eventually overwhelm the cooling from sulfur and deliver another large kick to global warming, climate scientists say.
China contributes one-sixth of the world's sulfur pollution. Together with the emissions from various other countries, those from China seem to offset more than one-third of the warming effect from manmade carbon dioxide already in the atmosphere, according to several climate models.
But the sulfur particles typically drift to the ground in a week and stop reflecting much sunlight. Recent research suggests that it takes up to 10 years before a new coal-fired power plant has poured enough long-lasting carbon dioxide into the air to offset the cooling effect of the plant's weekly sulfur emissions.
Chinese use of coal is accelerating:
Already, China uses more coal than the United States, the European Union and Japan combined. And it has increased coal consumption 14 percent in each of the past two years in the broadest industrialization ever. Every week to 10 days, another coal-fired power plant opens somewhere in China that is big enough to serve all the households in Dallas or San Diego.
With the lifespan of 50 or more years, these coal power plants will be pumping out the CO2 for decades.
And this older article discusses how China has already overtaken the U.S. in consumption of almost all major resources, including steel, aluminum, copper, fertilizer, meat, rice, wheat, and, of course, coal:
Looking at energy use in China means also considering coal, which supplies nearly two thirds of energy demand. Here China's burning of 800 million tons easily exceeds the 574 million tons burned in the United States. With its coal use far exceeding that of the United States and with its oil and natural gas use climbing fast, it is only a matter of time until China will also be the world's top emitter of carbon. Soon the world may have two major climate disrupters.
We still use three times the amount of oil than China (hooray for us).
There is still no reliable, proven, financially viable method to remove the CO2 from burning coal. The current rave is storage underground (see this brief explanation at the bottom of this article), called "carbon capture and storage (CCS)" but it has problems that have yet to be overcome, including cost and permenancy:
Among the key concerns NGOs have about carbon capture are:
- Doubts as to whether CO2 storage can really be made permanent. While oil and gas fields are reasonably well understood over periods of a few decades, the long-term performance of seals and the character of other formations such as saline aquifers is much less well understood. CO2 would need to be trapped permanently - meaning at a minimum for tens of thousands of years.
At least in the U.S., there is a growing awareness that global warming is coming, and a slow movement of the population toward the idea that something needs to be done (despite right-wing rhetoric). Although there is some action by the Chinese government toward this goal, the country is still in the throes of economic expansion, not conservation. The incredible pace at which coal-fired power plants are going into production to feed the thirst of 1.2 billion electricity-hungry people cheaply (they pay only a few dollars per month for electricity) means that the rate of CO2 emissions will greatly increase over the next few decades, not decrease or stop altogether as many climate scientists recommend to avoid a complete melting of the polar caps.
The Chinese carbon problem is going to have to be a major policy issue for the next congress and president to make any serious attempt at preventing global warming.