Coal on the rise in China, US, India

‘Hydro’ drowns mountains

BEIJING, June 27, (Agencies): The world’s biggest coal users — China, the United States and India — have boosted coal mining in 2017, in an abrupt departure from last year’s record global decline for the heavily polluting fuel and a setback to efforts to rein in climate change emissions.

Mining data reviewed by The Associated Press show that production through May is up by at least 121 million tons, or 6 percent, for the three countries compared to the same period last year. The change is most dramatic in the US, where coal mining rose 19 percent in the first five months of the year, according to US Department of Energy data. Coal’s fortunes had appeared to hit a new low less than two weeks ago, when British energy company BP reported that tonnage mined worldwide fell 6.5 percent in 2016, the largest drop on record. China and the US accounted for almost all the decline, while India showed a slight increase.

The reasons for this year’s turnaround include policy shifts in China, changes in US energy markets and India’s continued push to provide electricity to more of its poor, industry experts said. President Donald Trump’s role as coal’s booster-in-chief in the US has played at most a minor role, they said.

The fuel’s popularity waned over the past several years as renewable power and natural gas made gains and China moved to curb dangerous levels of urban smog from burning coal.

Trump

Whether coal’s comeback proves lasting has significant implications for long-term emission reduction targets, and for environmentalists’ hopes that China and India could emerge as leaders in battling climate change.

While the US reversal is expected to prove temporary, analysts agree that India’s use of coal will continue to grow. They’re divided on the forecast for China over the next decade.

Industry representatives say the mining resurgence underscores coal’s continued importance in power generation, though analysts caution its long-term growth prospects remain bleak.

The US, China and India combined produce about two-thirds of the coal mined worldwide, and the latter two nations also import coal to meet demand. India’s production expanded even during coal’s global downturn.

“If you look at those three countries, everyone else is irrelevant in the scheme of things,” said Tim Buckley, energy finance director for the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis.

Burning coal for power, manufacturing and heat is a primary source of the carbon dioxide emissions that scientists say is driving climate change. Reducing such emissions was a critical piece of the 2015 Paris climate accord that Trump announced this month he wants to exit.

Almost every other nation continues to support the deal, including China and India. China, India and the US produce almost half of global greenhouse gas emissions.

Coal accounts for almost half of greenhouse emissions from burning fossil fuels, according to the Global Carbon Project. China is by far the world’s largest coal user, consuming half the global supply.

YAJIANG, China:

Implications

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Towering walls of concrete entomb lush forests on mountainsides in southwest China as workers toil on the dry riverbed below to build the country’s latest mega-dam.

The colossal construction site in Sichuan province swallows three rivers, providing another display of China’s engineering prowess but also of the trauma it inflicts on people and nature along the way.

Once completed in 2023, the 295-metre behemoth will be the world’s third tallest dam, producing 3,000 megawatts of energy. But for the communities around the massive project — some as far as 100 kilometres (60 miles) upstream — the Lianghekou dam will drown ancestral homes, revered Buddhist monasteri es, fertile crops and sacred mountains.

Beijing is building hydropower at a breakneck pace in ethnically Tibetan regions as part of an ambitious undertaking to reduce the country’s dependence on coal and cut emissions that have made it the world’s top polluter.

China had just two dams in 1949, but now boasts some 22,000 — nearly half the world total — in all but one of the country’s major waterways.

Mountains and rivers are revered as sacred in Tibetan Buddhism, and the extensive construction, which began in 2014, has alarmed locals who believe they can only live peacefully if the nature around them is protected.

“Last year, people said that a big forest fire happened because they blasted a road into the holy mountain, and it took revenge,” said villager Tashi Yungdrung, a farmer with red thread wound through her thick braid who tends a small herd of yaks in the pastures above her stone, square-windowed home.

Most would not dare remove so much as a single stone from the mountain Palshab Drakar, an important pilgrimage site, she said. Villagers are bracing for mass relocations, an experience that has previously caused havoc elsewhere in China.

Beginning in the 1990s, more than a million were moved for the Three Gorges Dam, the world’s largest in terms of capacity, with thousands still mired in poverty.

Plans posted at the Lianghekou construction site showed that 22 power plants will be built along the Yalong, a Yangtze tributary, collectively capable of generating 30 gigawatts of electricity — a fifth of China’s current total installed hydropower capacity.

Li Zhaolong, a Tibetan from Zhaba village, said he received 300,000 yuan ($44,000) in government compensation to build a new home on higher ground, where he will move next year.

But the 28,000 yuan moving fee his family received per person will not last long once their crops are submerged and they have no other sources of income.

“Before we were farmers, and now we have no land,” said Li.

“We can’t move to a township, because we are uneducated and there will be no way to make a living there.”

Some 6,000 people across four counties will be relocated, according to a state-affiliated energy website.

Five monasteries have been or will be rebuilt on higher ground, but their spiritual importance will be diminished as the communities they serve are displaced, a lama named Lobsang said.