The Guardian’s Damian Carrington gathers up a report on coal consumption and CO2 emissions in China:
Coal-burning in China is in significant decline, according to official figures released on Tuesday, signalling a major turnaround for the world’s biggest polluter.
The new data is good news for the fight against climate change but bad for the struggling global coal industry.
China saw a huge increase in coal-burning for power and industry in the last two decades but has suffered serious air pollution as a result. However in recent years there has been a surge in low-carbon energy and a slowdown in the economy – GDP growth fell in 2015 to its lowest in 25 years – as China moves away from manufacturing. …
China’s coal use has fallen in 2015 across a wide range of measures and its national carbon emissions are likely to have fallen by about 3% as a result. There was a 3.5% drop in coal production, coal-fired electricity generation fell 2.8% and overall power generation dropped 0.2%, the first fall in 50 years. There were similar decreases in coal-intensive heavy industry such as iron, steel and cement.
Other recent developments were coal imports to China plummeting by 35% year-on-year in December 2015 and the government’s ban on new coal mines for three years.
In contrast, renewables investment in China hit an all-time high in 2015 at $110bn. Overall low-carbon electricity generation – hydro, wind, nuclear and solar – increased more than 20% in 2015.
Continued positive developments – and given the government structure of China, this could move very quickly. And what about that coal industry? BloombergBusiness reports
U.S. coal producers Alpha Natural Resources Inc., Patriot Coal Corp. and Walter Energy Inc. have sought bankruptcy protection [in 2015]. …
“As commodity markets fall further, production will have to be cut,” said Christoph Eibl, CEO of Tiberius Asset Management AG, which has $800 million in commodity investments. “Producers will have to go bankrupt.”
InvestmentMine provides this chart on coal prices:
It occurs to me that the front line workers in this industry should perhaps be an explicit target for retraining. After all, through no fault of their own they are in an industry identified as detrimental to the continued survival of human civilization, after years of being a positive. They are often ill-paid and very dependent on the industry, so if it goes away, especially because governments have determined that it is damaging our future, then those who labor in the mines should be first up for compensation & training.
Tonight I’m not feeling a lot of sympathy for management and shareholders.
(h/t Michael Graham Richard @ Treehugger.com)
