The New American By
A Helsinki-based research group is reporting that Communist China is set to build another 43 coal-fired power plants along with 18 new blast furnaces as part of its newest five-year-plan. These new projects have all been announced in the first half of 2021.
The report, produced by the Center for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA) along with the U.S. group Global Energy Monitor (GEM), was released just scant days after the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its Sixth Assessment Report on the current state of the climate, which General Secretary of the UN António Guterres called a “code red for humanity.”
The new greenhouse-gas emitting projects are in line with the country’s latest five-year-plan, which calls for hundreds of such plants to be built between 2021 and 2025. Oddly enough, the new plants are also in line with China’s pledge to the Paris Climate Agreement, which states only that the country will reach peak emissions by 2030.
Last September, General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party Xi Jinping pledged that China would reach carbon neutrality by 2060. The climate pledges China has made seem to be at cross purposes with the building of the coal-fired plants and blast furnaces.
In China, it would seem, economic progress is still allowed to trump environmentalism.
“There is this desire in the Chinese political and economic system to keep on building, to continue the infrastructure fever,” said Li Shuo, a Greenpeace advisor based in Beijing.
Both CREA and GEM reported in February that “In 2020, China built over three times as much new coal power capacity as all other countries in the world combined — the equivalent of more than one large coal plant per week.”
Climate alarmists consider coal the dirtiest of the fossil fuels and claim that the carbonized plant matter is responsible for more than 0.3ºC of the supposed 1ºC increase in global temperatures.
The CREA report reveals that the 43 new coal-fired plants and blast furnaces will add some 150 million metric tons to China’s CO2 emissions. That 150 million tons is roughly half of the U.K.’s total emissions.
Despite the grim news about the new coal-fired plants and blast furnaces, the authors of the report are also attempting to make China look like a good guy in terms of its climate policy.
“CO2 emissions growth in China slowed down in the second quarter, indicating that the rapid emissions growth seen since the end of the COVID-19 lockdown in early 2020 could be coming to an end,” the report states.
“The slowdown reflects recent steps the government has taken to control financial excesses and runaway steel production, including tightening credit to the construction sector and instituting controls on industrial output.”
According to one of the report’s authors, the Chinese government deserves credit for slowing their pace of expansion.
“I think that it’s clear that there’s already a shift from the runaway expansion of all kinds of industry and construction that we’ve seen for the past year and a bit to trying to at least moderate the pace,” said Lauri Myllyvirta, a lead analyst for the CREA.
Myllyvirta believes the new coal-fired plants will tell the story. “These [new coal-fired plants] will test whether it’s still acceptable to keep building these things.”
Isn’t it already unacceptable to keep building “these things.” Isn’t that what the UN IPCC is telling us with its new alarmist report — that “code red for humanity?”
If the United States or the European Union or any other country in the world was in the process of building 43 new coal-fired power plants and 18 new blast furnaces, it would be front-page headline news for weeks. Said country would be pilloried for contributing to the destruction of the planet and ostracized by the media.
When Communist China does it, the only thing that happens is a mention in a hard-to-find research paper.
