Environmentalist group Greenpeace on Wednesday became one of the few green organizations that is complaining about China’s titanic consumption of carbon-spewing coal, even as the Chinese government claims it will begin reducing its emissions in 2030 and become “carbon-neutral” in 2060.
The South China Morning Post (SCMP) reported on Greenpeace East Asia’s distress that China is not only digging and burning more coal today, but it is still throwing up new coal-fired power plants at a dizzying rate, increasing its needs for tomorrow.
China’s 8.63 gigawatts of new coal plants in the first quarter of 2022 added nearly half as much capacity as the entire year of 2021, which was in turn a banner year for Chinese coal-fired plant construction.
“Building more coal-fired power capacity will not provide energy security for China. This is a deep-seated falsehood. An overcapacity of this one energy source is a major hurdle for energy security, as well as China’s energy transition,” fumed Wu Jinghan of Greenpeace East Asia.
Wu might have been missing the real “deep-seated falsehood” in all this, and who China expects to believe it.
As the SCMP pointed out, Beijing’s ardor for coal power exploded after last year’s power shortages, which prompted dictator Xi Jinping to suddenly forget all the promises he made about phasing out coal power. By April of this year, Chinese Communist officials were openly urging their state-run mining and trading companies to dig and buy every scrap of coal they could.
“Provincial governments look to Beijing closely for guidance. So long as ‘energy security’ is the code word for traditional, emissions-heavy economic planning, they will use it. Coal-dependent provinces need the right directions to move forward,” Wu said, suggesting China’s real problems lie more with poor electrical grid construction than insufficient power generation capacity.
“The rebound in new coal power construction is in sharp contrast with the central government’s strengthened pledges to reduce emissions,” complained Shen Xinyi of the Center for Research on Energy and Clean Air.
These environmental activists seem to be willfully missing the simple explanation that China never had any intention of compromising its industrial coals to please the climate change movement, which Beijing sees as a useful political weapon against Western industry.
Chinese companies make good money selling “green energy” components to the Western world, and they will buy their own products up to a point, but they are not about to shackle their own ambitions to the limited and unreliable energy provided by windmills and solar panels. As soon as a power shortage threatened to shut down China’s factories, the coal shovels came out, and they are not going back into storage any time soon.
China is so rapacious for fossil fuel energy that it might even drop its ban on Australian coal, imposed in a fit of pique when the Aussies insisted on investigating the true origins of the Wuhan coronavirus. China’s manufacturing hubs desperately need an influx of energy and coal for steel-making after the devastating “dynamic zero-Covid” lockdowns of the past few months inflicted more damage than expected on the Chinese economy.