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If China doesnt begin to limit its coal consumption by 2030, it will be almost impossible for the world avoid a situation where global warming stays below 2°C, a new study released Monday found.
The study, led by the U.K.s Center for Climate Change Economics and Policy and the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, recommends China put a cap on greenhouse gas emissions from coal by 2020, and then swiftly reduce its dependency on the fossil fuel. The reductions would not only increase public health and wellness and decrease climate change, but could also have a major positive effect on the global dynamics of climate cooperation, the report said.
The actions China takes in the next decade will be critical for the future of China and the world, the study said. Whether China moves onto an innovative, sustainable and low-carbon growth path this decade will more or less determine both Chinas longer-term economic prospects in a natural resource-constrained world, and the worlds prospects of cutting greenhouse gas emissions sufficiently to manage the grave risks of climate change.
China, faced with ever-worsening pollution in its major cities—a recent report deemed Beijing "barely suitable for living"—is doing what so many industrializing nations have done before it: banishing its titanic smog spewers to poor or rural areas so everyone else can breathe easier. But China isn't just relegating its dirty coal-fired power plants to the outskirts of society; for years, it's been building 16 unprecedentedly massive, brand new "coal bases" in rural parts of the country. There, they won't stifle China's megacities; they'll churn out enough pollution to help smother the entire world.
The biggest of those bases, the Ningdong Energy and Chemical Industry Base, spans nearly 400 square miles, about the size of LA. It's already operational, and seemingly always expanding. It's operated by Shenhua, one of the biggest coal companies in the world. China hopes to uses these coal bases not just to host some of the world's largest coal-fired power plants, but to use super-energy intensive technology to convert the coal into a fuel called syngas and use it to make plastics and other materials.
Syngas is healthier to breathe when burned than typical coal—but as Motherboard has noted before, synthesizing the stuff emits nearly twice the carbon pollution. That's why when Inside Climate News, the Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative environmental outfit, traveled to China to investigate the operation, they, and a number of climate experts concluded it would "doom the climate."
It's projected to finally be finished by the end of the decade, when it will produce a jaw-dropping 30,000 MW of power, sucking down 100 million tons of coal every year in the process. And it's just one of over a dozen such sprawling operations.
As such, Ningdong does a fairly good job of epitomizing China's grave threat to the global climate system. A recent paper in Nature Climate Change noted that if all of the coal-to-gas plants get built, they'd produce 21 billion tons of CO2 alone. The Washington Post's Brad Plumer puts that in context: "The entire nation of China produced 7.7 billion tons of carbon-dioxide in 2011." Put simply, China's on a path to produce an unholy amount of carbon pollution.
Writing in Rolling Stone, Bill McKibben estimated that, based on climatologists' forecasts, humans worldwide can can only safely burn some 365 gigatons (or billions of tons) of carbon before we seriously disrupt the global climate system. Using those estimates, Kelly notes that even if China where to burn just 10 billion tons of carbon each year, that would put it "on track to consume the world's remaining 349 billion tons by 2050." After that, the table is set for runaway, or catastrophic, global warming.
China's giant coal bases, then, may very well be the largest looming threat to a stable global climate.
I will say it once again, we must start basing tarriffs on polution and worker protection laws in the nations we deal with.
