Can China’s Coal Industry be Reconciled with the Environment
In his report Can China’s coal industry be reconciled with the environment? (PDF Download Available Here), Xunpeng Shi takes a closer look at how energy intensity is measure, the level of emissions in China, and what that means.
To draw conclusions, he leverages two models:
1) is a fixed effects panel (WGE denotes pollutant emissions)
WGEitj = ß0+(ß1+ß2T)FuelCit+(ß3+ß4T)MatCit+ß5Xit+aij+uitj
WGE denotes pollutant emissions; FuelC and MatC denote consumption of fuel coal and material coal, respectively; T is a general time trend; aij is the province-specific effect in the case of the jth pollutant; uitj is a normally distributed error term; j = 1,2,3 is sulphur dioxide (SO2), smoke and dust respectively
and
2) Index Decomposition has also been a tool as most WGEs in China come from the consumption of fuel, they are affected by factors such as economic structure, energy intensity, economic development and population growth.
It is an article that has a lot of technical reading, so be forewarned.
The core conclusions:
1) This research clarifies the misunderstanding that the same unit of coal will always cause the same amount of environmental pollution.
2) This study reveals that energy intensity in China has been increased and thus, besides of economic and population growth, has led to an increase in final emissions. With a fall in emission intensity, the coal industry can be developed while improvements are made to the environment—providing that emission intensity continues to fall without limit.
3) The coal industry is not necessarily incompatible even with the worst-case scenario for the future: a carbon-constrained world. The biggest challenge for the future development of the coal industry is how to deal with carbon dioxide emissions and climate change.
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