China’s True Cost of Coal
Monday, October 27, 2008 7:55WWF, Greenpeace, and The Energy Foundation have just released the 74 page report The True Cost of Coal (PDF Here) that looks at the role of coal in China’s society.. and its toll on the society.
To introduce the topics of the report, Greenpeace has loaded the video below that runs through a number of the direct impacts the coal mining industry in Shanxi has on residents (houses falling in was a new one for me).
I will be taking the time to read this report later this week and offering more thoughts, and I highly recommend you take the time as well. I have read a number of Greenpeace’s reports, and all the “save the world” aside, their reports are some of the best researched I have seen in China.. and very informative.
UPDATE: Shortly after posting this, I received another report entitled Can China’s coal industry be
reconciled with the environment? (h/t East Asia Forum). Written by Xunpeng Shi,
The central thesis of Shi’s paper is that, due to a decreasing trend of “pollution emissions” per unit of coal in China, the coal industry can “harmonise with the environment”. This seems to suggest that due to the improving emission intensity of China’s coal industry, there will eventually come a point where its emissions are not damaging to the environment.
Perrine says:
October 27th, 2008 at 6:20 pm
Thank you for the post,
very informative and very well documented
would be glad to talk about this further once i ll read the entire report
thanks
Perrine
Rich says:
October 28th, 2008 at 9:12 am
hi Perrine.
Thanks. How are you these days? Are you FT at the firm in your email?
R
Xebra says:
October 29th, 2008 at 3:01 am
That was a sobering and eyeopening post. Coal has its perils when mining it and when using it as well. Which is why we need to do more to produce electricity the eco friendly way using wind, solar, wave and other kinds of renewable and sustainable energy.
Xunpeng Shi says:
January 15th, 2009 at 9:39 pm
My argument of a declining emission intensity does not deny choice of non-fossil energy. Some non-fossil enegy is great. But overall, renewable energy is not matured enough to replace fossil energy.
When we are patient on renewable energy, we should give equal opportunity to a clean coal. My empricial study shows that emission intensity of coal has declined significantly in the past two decades.
By the way, we make decision by balancing benefits and costs. Therefore, we use coal even it is dangerous and polluted, just like we drive car even it is more dangerous than walk.