Addressing China's climate challenge (BBC)

[eppur_se_muova]

By David Shukman
Science correspondent, BBC News, Shanghai
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China is on course to overtake the United States as the world's biggest emitter of greenhouse gases.
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The figures surrounding China's electricity industry are staggering. Last year alone China added the same amount of generating capacity as there is in the entire United Kingdom.

Current plans call for the opening of a new power station every week, and most of them coal-fired.
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No wonder climate scientists bring every conversation round to this country and its energy plans. What happens here has the potential to undermine any of the reductions in greenhouse gases envisaged by the Kyoto Protocol.
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more: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6111528.stm

[NNadir]

1. China is the world writ large.

All of the disaster of uncontrolled population is realized in the Chinese situation. In fact, the main crime of the Chinese is having a massive population that wants to live like Americans or at least Europeans.

We in the west are apparently uncomfortable with this, feeling that it our exclusive privilege to live a life style that wholly disregards the future for our short term gratification. That the Chinese have not agreed to this state of affairs, of course, should not come as a surprise, but we should temper our angst with respect to the subject as much by meeting our own responsibility as by pointing our fingers at the Chinese. The fact is that with about one quarter of the population of China, they still have yet to pass us as the world's worst greenhouse gas emitter.

That said, the Chinese at least are trying. I have seen many papers of Chinese authorship in the journal Energy and Fuels concerning energy transformations, everything from biomass to supercritical water oxidation.

I note that China is leading the world in nuclear power expansion. The Chinese have 10 operating nuclear reactors, 5 under construction, 13 on order, and 50 in planning stages. If these plans are realized, China will become the second largest producer of nuclear energy in the world, passing France.

http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/reactors.htm

China produced as of 2004, 43.4 exajoules of coal based energy. (For comparison purposes the US produced 23.8 exajoules of coal based energy - however we burn 25 times as much natural gas as they do.)

http://www.eia.doe.gov/pub/international/iealf/tablee4.xls

http://www.eia.doe.gov/pub/international/iealf/tablee3.xls

In order to completely eliminate coal, China would need about 400 nuclear power plants, slightly less than the number that now exists on earth. In owning, building, planning and contemplating 78 of them, they are well on the way to having a plan. I suspect that we are nowhere near meeting our share of responsibility as they are. I'm quite sure as well that China will ultimately have many hundreds of reactors. They haven't stopped their planning to be sure.

[eppur_se_muova]

2. That's the difference w/Chinese leaders ... they plan rationally, even if their politics suck.

It's like they take their jobs seriously, or something. Maybe they just understand that having the whole country collapse around their ears is A Very Bad Thing, a point that completely escapes the Neocon cabal. Maybe it's that the Chinese have a different history to remember -- one in which failed leaders are tossed into wells, or worse.