Full extent of global coal ‘binge’ is hidden, say

THE climate impacts of the world’s fossil-fuelled power plants are being underestimated because of poor accounting, say researchers.

Governments would get a truer picture if they included the lifetime emissions of a facility in the year it goes into production

These “committed emissions” have been growing by 4% a year between 2000 and 2012, the scientists say.

Power plants in China and India alone account for half of this commitment.

At present, UN accounting procedures only include the emissions from coal and gas powered electricity generation in the year in which they occur.

According to the authors of the new paper, this method means they are missing a significant part of the picture.

“We are trying to get past a kind of myopia that sets in when people focus exclusively on the emissions of the day,” said one of the authors, Prof Robert Socolow from Princeton.

By taking an expected production life of 40 years, the researchers calculated that the new coal and gas plants built in 2012 would, in total, produce around 19bn tonnes of CO2.

This is significantly more than the 14bn tonnes produced by all the existing fossil fuel plants in the world in the same year.

“We’ve been hiding things from ourselves,” said Prof Socolow.

What Prof Socolow termed the “Chinese power plant construction binge”, which has occurred since 1995, was a major factor in the story.

Plants in China represent 42% of committed future emissions, while India is responsible for 8%. BBC