China’s clean energy investment makes sense

Colin Jones, St Leonard, Exeter.

People are rightly critical of China for building coal power stations. But that’s not the full story as the country is also working hard so that it will be able to use them less and import less coal.

China is facing challenges that means it will sometimes need coal; for example when extreme heat and drought simultaneously increase electricity demand and reduce supply.

What people often aren’t aware of is that China is investing far more in clean energy than fossil fuels. In 2023 alone, it installed more solar panel capacity than the USA has ever installed and 65 per cent of the world’s new wind power.

China is also manufacturing the equipment to allow other countries to reduce their reliance on fossil fuels and is a world leader in research and development in clean-energy technologies. China wouldn’t be doing this if it didn’t make economic sense.

In contrast, the UK government has just been defeated in a court case for not doing enough to meet its targets for cutting greenhouse gas emissions because it had something more akin to a wish list than a plan. In response, the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero said what amounted to “haven’t we done well”. In fact, until recently we had done well but that’s not the point. If we don’t want to miss out, we need to keep doing well.

Given the available technology, just think what could be achieved if we had a government that knew what a strategy looks like.

Chris Snow, Stoke Gabriel, Devon.

I feel like I’ve entered a time warp when I read the letters of Clark Cross and Charles Wardrop denying the science of climate change. Years ago, I had an exchange of letters in my local newspaper with self-styled ‘climate sceptics’ on the subject.

The pattern is pretty similar; reliance on a handful of scientists who support their position while ignoring the 99.9 per cent who don’t, plus of course, the wacky conspiracy theories. The 99.9 per cent figure comes from a Cornell University study of papers published between 2012 and 2020. It concludes “Our finding is that the broadly-defined scientific consensus likely far exceeds 99 per cent regarding the role of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions in modern climate change, and may even be as high as 99.9 per cent.”

Modern climate science is founded on the fundamental laws of physics through the work of thousands of scientists, including some of the great names of science, and can be traced back 200 years to Joseph Fourier in the 1820s who calculated that the temperature of the Earth was much warmer than could be explained by the sun alone.

The basic heat-trapping properties of carbon dioxide were discovered by Eunice Foote and John Tyndall in the 1850s. Over 120 years ago, Svante Arrhenius predicted a warming of 4°C for a doubling of CO2 concentration, impressively close to the current IPCC estimate of between 2.5-4°C.

In my exchange years ago I pointed to the fact that even the fossil fuel companies themselves such as Shell and BP don’t dispute the science on climate change. We now know that climate science was long ago confirmed by the oil industry’s own scientists. The oil companies may indulge in greenwashing, but they don’t dispute the science.