Doly wrote:The will be hard pressed to just make all new generation nuclear or renewable wing and solar and I doubt they can even achieve that so they will be forced to keep building new coal plants for years yet to come.
The Chinese are several things: a civilization with a very old history, a river people who understand very well how devastating floods can be, an empire that has been limited to a geographical area, and a society with a social structure that is still significantly based on clans and can be considered neo-feudal. All this makes me think that they are capable of understanding climate change much, much better than Americans with a very short history, focused on the sea more than rivers, children of an expanding empire ideology, with a society that has lost a lot of the traditional family ties and is trying to substitute the social glue with artificial sweeteners coming from their screens and obviously failing. While I doubt that Americans will be able to show restraint in building new coal power plants, I think the Chinese can do it.
It boils down to long term vs short term thinking IMO. One thing Eastern Asian cultures excel at is long term planing. Where an American or a German is looking to next year or more likely next quarter the Chinese, Japanese, South Koreans all too to the next decade and in a tentative sense the next century.
IMO the Chinese have long since understood that humans are pushing the climate into the northern hemisphere greenhouse condition. They have a large well educated population of scientists who study the same paleoclimate data as westerners and if we have ten brilliant paleo climate specialists they have a hundred. Having discovered humanity is set on its course I believe what the Chinese leadership are actually doing is planning for the adaptation to the forthcoming climate conditions. For example they are building several new cities every decade in the interior regions where they will not be subject to flooding even if the entire ice mass of Greenland and Antarctica were to rapidly collapse and melt. They are also developing nuclear technologies for both electricity and process heat, the kind of tech which can desalinate vast volumes of saline water for irrigation and other human uses. Just like the Desert Southwest American states the inner Mongolian lands have deep saline aquifers that are useless as is due to salt content but which can be processed into fresh water while recovering useful chemicals as a side product. In point of fact there big nuclear energy research facility is planted right in the middle of Inner Mongolia where those applications might be very important to the next generation.
So having accepted that the climate will flip no matter which course they follow the Chinese are taking advantage of cheap fossil fuels while they can to develop their country as completely as possible and prepare themselves for the coming changes. I admire the coldly rational logic of the decision making while at the same time being rather disgusted that the "western democracies" are all behaving like blithering idiots mouthing pretty words about reduced greenhouse impacts while simply offshoring all their industry possible to the east Asian nations willing to ignore pretense.
We now have a situation where German and UK power stations are paying for North American trees to be cut down, converted into pressed wood pellets and shipped across the Atlantic to be burned in power plants designed for coal so they can claim to be carbon neutral. That is simply insanity on several levels not the least of which is if you account for the harvesting and transport of the wood pellets in your carbon calculations they are just about as intensive as simply burning hard coal. Then there is the fact that they are taking recently sequestered carbon and releasing it back into the atmosphere as if the natural forests had no intrinsic or natural value as they were before being harvested as biofuel. I am all for forest management, I grew up in Michigan where lumbering is still a fairly significant employer. The difference is in Michigan in the 1980's there were lumbering operations getting lots of praise because they used scrap from their lumbering operations as fuel for their wood processing systems making them fossil fuel independent, more or less. They also spent a fair amount to reforest the areas they harvested to make lumbering a sustainable business with sections being cut in rotations with fast growing trees planted every spring in newly harvested areas. The modern biofuel wood practices are reducing forest lands at a high rate, far faster than natural growth can replenish the harvested ground.
Then you have the madness of "blue hydrogen" which is hydrogen manufactured by stripping it from methane gas and then mixing the hydrogen into the natural gas distribution network. This is patently insane as the stripping and theoretical sequestering of the CO2 generated reduces the energy value of the Hydrogen to the point where it is a net negative fuel source. What I mean is an honest energy accounting clearly demonstrates that they would be better off burning the methane directly and then dedicating some small portion of the renewable energy that arrives at random times to pure sequestration duty. In fact if all wind and solar energy were dedicated to sequestering you would actually come out further ahead at both keeping the grid stable and removing some of the released CO2 from the atmosphere.
It has even been claimed though I have not seen the numbers myself that if you take the liquid biofuels like corn ethanol and soybean oil and simply poured them down injection wells into depleted oil formations you would gain more benefit by sequestering the carbon they carry than you get by using them as substitutes for fossil fuels they offset. You gain even more advantage if you dump the corn liquor, the sweet liquid they grow the yeast in, because un-fermented syrup doesn't release CO2 during the yeast growth phase. Sequestered deep in a depleted formation there is no yeast and even if it does somehow get contaminated the resulting CO2 is trapped in the formation instead of vented into the atmosphere.
For a third example it was proposed back in the 1990's right after the Kyoto Protocol was signed that the government could gather American yard waste, bale it into big blocks like farmers do with straw and alfalfa and either sequester it by burial in the desert or by dumping it in the delta region of the Mississippi River where the silt coming off the continental shelf would entomb it on the sea floor. You could even stack it out on the vast salt flats of glacial lake Bonneville where the natural salt would preserve it from biological processes that would reduce it back to CO2. Heck with all the old coal underground mines around you could stuff bales into the empty mined out rooms left behind when the coal was pulled out.
There are 1,001 things the government could do to reduce CO2 releases from fossil fuel many of which would not much effect business as usual. A simple $0.05/gallon fuel tax would pay for any or several of the above proposals with minimal economic impact. Unfortunately we are in the end stage of democracy where decisive action is no longer considered important compared to soft soaping the voters for the next election cycle.