9 ms·

Chinese companies building numerous overseas coal plants

54 points by woodandsteel 9y ago

woodandsteel 9y ago
The article also says: "Over all, 1,600 coal plants are planned or under construction in 62 countries, according to Urgewald’s tally, which uses data from the Global Coal Plant Tracker portal. The new plants would expand the world’s coal-fired power capacity by 43 percent. "The fleet of new coal plants would make it virtually impossible to meet the goals set in the Paris climate accord, which aims to keep the increase in global temperatures from preindustrial levels below 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit."
- calafrax 9y ago
  So the Paris climate accord will have the same impact as all previous international climate agreements: zero. That is shocking, positively shocking.
mtimjones 9y ago
But I thought the U.S. was the big boogeyman for climate? Trump did the right thing.
zaro 9y ago
"The fleet of new coal plants would make it virtually impossible to meet the goals set in the Paris climate accord, which aims to keep the increase in global temperatures from preindustrial levels below 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit." I've been watching some lectures on climate change recently, all of the climatologist I've seen in the lectures were claiming that staying below 2℃ is impossible to achieve anyway. Staying at 2℃ or less, requires around 2050 the world going into negative carbon emissions, which nobody know yet how to do exactly.
- lmm 9y ago
  It's not a case of "anyway" though - 2.1 degrees is worse than 2, 3.1 is worse than 3. If 2 is impossible that means the safe scenario is now impossible and a certain amount of flooding of cities etc. is inevitable, but we can still affect how bad it's going to be.
  - calafrax 9y ago
    True, but if we are facing massive climate change with unpredictable catastrophic effects then isn't that a good reason to build up as much industrial and military capacity as possible to withstand those unpredictable effects? That certainly seems to be what most people are doing even if they are saying something different.
    - lmm 9y ago
      > True, but if we are facing massive climate change with unpredictable catastrophic effects then isn't that a good reason to build up as much industrial and military capacity as possible to withstand those unpredictable effects? No, I don't think so. We have a pretty good idea of what kind of things are going to happen - if we were serious about trying to withstand them we'd be putting more efforts into flood defences, desalination plants, disaster-relief type stuff - and on a longer-term level maybe food-supply work. Even if you believe what's needed is industry, in the long-term the scientific uses of oil and plastics are far more vital than burning it moving people between the office and the suburbs. But no-one really believes at a visceral level that the oil supply is limited, because we've spent our whole lives living with abundant oil. Add in a dose of classic tragedy of the commons - reducing carbon emissions makes things better for everyone, while building up your own economy/industry and ignoring emissions hurts the common cause but is profitable for individual nations.
      - TheSpiceIsLife 9y ago
        The parent comment said "build up as much industrial and military capacity as possible to withstand those unpredictable effects". And then you said: "if we were serious about trying to withstand them we'd be putting more efforts into flood defences, desalination plants, disaster-relief" These are the same.
- xiaoma 9y ago
  Don't believe everything you hear from talking heads on TV. We could put the earth into an ice age for under 1% of global GDP. Discussing geo-engineering is generally seen as a moral hazard, though, so western commentators act like no such possibility exists. The real threat is ecosystem collapse.
  - vixen99 9y ago
    "We could put ...". And your basis for that confident assertion?
    - xiaoma 9y ago
      Honestly? It's from voracious reading over many years, and including both pop and more academic sources. Books almost always go deeper than what you'll find in video format. That said, if you try googling geo-engineering and climate change for a few minutes, you'll almost certainly find some of the techniques people have evaluated, their trade-offs and how the issue of moral hazard adds a cost to discussing them.
  - saiya-jin 9y ago
    > Don't believe everything you hear from talking heads on TV. don't believe everything you read on some anonymous internet forums, especially some random wild claims with 0 solid data backup
  - Symmetry 9y ago
    The only way to do it that cheap is with sulfate aerosols. We don't have the data to use the right amount yet but that's fixable. A larger problem is it would make ocean acidification even worse. That might end up being better than the alternative but its not a step to take casually.
    - phreeza 9y ago
      What about marine cloud brightening? Wikipedia claims that could be done for a couple of billion $/year. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_cloud_brightening#Costs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_cloud_brightening#Costs
- aplummer 9y ago
  > going into negative carbon emissions, which nobody know yet how to do exactly Pretty sure planting a lot of trees is a good start
  - undersuit 9y ago
    You have to keep planting them. And you have to watch that they are developing ecosystems to encourage more carbon sequestration into the ecosystem. And you have to keep it up, and water them, and fight attempts to strip the plot and turn it back into monoculture farmland, and you probably need to make sure no fires happen in the first couple hundred years until you're ok with natural fires dumping carbon back into the atmosphere which also entails some kind of light controlled burn or very targeted application of intense heat for any species that rely on fires to reproduce. I'm totally for it, I love having trees everywhere, especially as I walk to most of my destinations.
  - zaro 9y ago
    I definitely is a good start, with precondition on stopping deforestation. But trees won't give negative carbon emissions unless industry cuts emissions dramatically. And also, the other problem with trees is you might have to convert farmlands back to forest, what happens to the food production then?
    - aplummer 9y ago
      I guess my point was that we do know how to do it, just not how to muster the will. In a war economy climate change would be disaster averted in a decade.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
basicplus2 9y ago
Coal should be gasified then the gas product used. This releases something like 75% more energy than burning coal directly and it is a cleaner process once produced.
- jlebrech 9y ago
  you mean Nazi oil? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_campaign_of_World_War_II https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_campaign_of_World_War_II
averagewall 9y ago
Come on. Pakistan has an energy crisis which is ruining the country. You want to hold them back economically in the name of the environment? This really is on western countries to pay for them to get clean energy if that's what they really want. Malawi? Don't develop electricity generation in Africa! You might make them less poor!
- pk22 9y ago
  Agree. We could use anything to have uninterrupted power for 24 hours. Although coal plants are being build but current government is also investing in hydel, solar and wind farms. I think coal will be a short term fix while we sort out economy and then focus more on renewables.
- melling 9y ago
  What happened to solar becoming cheaper than coal? I thought we were close. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-06-01/cheaper-solar-in-india-prompts-rethink-for-more-coal-projects https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-06-01/cheaper-s... Natural gas is cheaper than coal in the US: https://www.usnews.com/opinion/economic-intelligence/articles/2017-03-09/abundant-cheap-natural-gas-is-the-real-reason-for-the-demise-of-coal https://www.usnews.com/opinion/economic-intelligence/article...
  - sfifs 9y ago
    Two words - "base load". In developing economies, sufficient base load power doesn't exist. Solar and Wind do nothing at scale when a stable base load power supply doesn't exist. SolarCity is experimenting with batteries powered by intermittent power supply in small islands but nothing at scale really exists a practical proven tech. Natural gas requires high security LNG terminal infra if you're not a producer
  - thriftwy 9y ago
    I imagine it's much harder to quickly prop up solar generation than it's to build a few coal plants. You would need some backbone before you can add solar on top (e.g. what happens at night?)
guelo 9y ago
Fuck our grandkids, they can spit on our graves all they want, we need to keep the GDP growth rate positive.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- opportune 9y ago
  At least the shareholders and party leaders will be happy!
Synaesthesia 9y ago
So, the US denies climate change, is not a signatory to the Paris accord, is the biggest fossil fuel user, and is now the biggest oil producer thanks to ita fracking programme. They can’t exactly be pointing fingers.

54 points by woodandsteel 9y ago

The article also says: "Over all, 1,600 coal plants are planned or under construction in 62 countries, according to Urgewald’s tally, which uses data from the Global Coal Plant Tracker portal. The new plants would expand the world’s coal-fired power capacity by 43 percent. "The fleet of new coal plants would make it virtually impossible to meet the goals set in the Paris climate accord, which aims to keep the increase in global temperatures from preindustrial levels below 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit."

calafrax 9y ago
So the Paris climate accord will have the same impact as all previous international climate agreements: zero. That is shocking, positively shocking.

mtimjones 9y ago

But I thought the U.S. was the big boogeyman for climate? Trump did the right thing.

zaro 9y ago

"The fleet of new coal plants would make it virtually impossible to meet the goals set in the Paris climate accord, which aims to keep the increase in global temperatures from preindustrial levels below 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit." I've been watching some lectures on climate change recently, all of the climatologist I've seen in the lectures were claiming that staying below 2℃ is impossible to achieve anyway. Staying at 2℃ or less, requires around 2050 the world going into negative carbon emissions, which nobody know yet how to do exactly.

lmm 9y ago
It's not a case of "anyway" though - 2.1 degrees is worse than 2, 3.1 is worse than 3. If 2 is impossible that means the safe scenario is now impossible and a certain amount of flooding of cities etc. is inevitable, but we can still affect how bad it's going to be.
- calafrax 9y ago
  True, but if we are facing massive climate change with unpredictable catastrophic effects then isn't that a good reason to build up as much industrial and military capacity as possible to withstand those unpredictable effects? That certainly seems to be what most people are doing even if they are saying something different.
  - lmm 9y ago
    > True, but if we are facing massive climate change with unpredictable catastrophic effects then isn't that a good reason to build up as much industrial and military capacity as possible to withstand those unpredictable effects? No, I don't think so. We have a pretty good idea of what kind of things are going to happen - if we were serious about trying to withstand them we'd be putting more efforts into flood defences, desalination plants, disaster-relief type stuff - and on a longer-term level maybe food-supply work. Even if you believe what's needed is industry, in the long-term the scientific uses of oil and plastics are far more vital than burning it moving people between the office and the suburbs. But no-one really believes at a visceral level that the oil supply is limited, because we've spent our whole lives living with abundant oil. Add in a dose of classic tragedy of the commons - reducing carbon emissions makes things better for everyone, while building up your own economy/industry and ignoring emissions hurts the common cause but is profitable for individual nations.
    - TheSpiceIsLife 9y ago
      The parent comment said "build up as much industrial and military capacity as possible to withstand those unpredictable effects". And then you said: "if we were serious about trying to withstand them we'd be putting more efforts into flood defences, desalination plants, disaster-relief" These are the same.
xiaoma 9y ago
Don't believe everything you hear from talking heads on TV. We could put the earth into an ice age for under 1% of global GDP. Discussing geo-engineering is generally seen as a moral hazard, though, so western commentators act like no such possibility exists. The real threat is ecosystem collapse.
- vixen99 9y ago
  "We could put ...". And your basis for that confident assertion?
  - xiaoma 9y ago
    Honestly? It's from voracious reading over many years, and including both pop and more academic sources. Books almost always go deeper than what you'll find in video format. That said, if you try googling geo-engineering and climate change for a few minutes, you'll almost certainly find some of the techniques people have evaluated, their trade-offs and how the issue of moral hazard adds a cost to discussing them.
- saiya-jin 9y ago
  > Don't believe everything you hear from talking heads on TV. don't believe everything you read on some anonymous internet forums, especially some random wild claims with 0 solid data backup
- Symmetry 9y ago
  The only way to do it that cheap is with sulfate aerosols. We don't have the data to use the right amount yet but that's fixable. A larger problem is it would make ocean acidification even worse. That might end up being better than the alternative but its not a step to take casually.
  - phreeza 9y ago
    What about marine cloud brightening? Wikipedia claims that could be done for a couple of billion $/year. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_cloud_brightening#Costs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_cloud_brightening#Costs
aplummer 9y ago
> going into negative carbon emissions, which nobody know yet how to do exactly Pretty sure planting a lot of trees is a good start
- undersuit 9y ago
  You have to keep planting them. And you have to watch that they are developing ecosystems to encourage more carbon sequestration into the ecosystem. And you have to keep it up, and water them, and fight attempts to strip the plot and turn it back into monoculture farmland, and you probably need to make sure no fires happen in the first couple hundred years until you're ok with natural fires dumping carbon back into the atmosphere which also entails some kind of light controlled burn or very targeted application of intense heat for any species that rely on fires to reproduce. I'm totally for it, I love having trees everywhere, especially as I walk to most of my destinations.
- zaro 9y ago
  I definitely is a good start, with precondition on stopping deforestation. But trees won't give negative carbon emissions unless industry cuts emissions dramatically. And also, the other problem with trees is you might have to convert farmlands back to forest, what happens to the food production then?
  - aplummer 9y ago
    I guess my point was that we do know how to do it, just not how to muster the will. In a war economy climate change would be disaster averted in a decade.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

basicplus2 9y ago

Coal should be gasified then the gas product used. This releases something like 75% more energy than burning coal directly and it is a cleaner process once produced.

jlebrech 9y ago
you mean Nazi oil? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_campaign_of_World_War_II https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_campaign_of_World_War_II

averagewall 9y ago

Come on. Pakistan has an energy crisis which is ruining the country. You want to hold them back economically in the name of the environment? This really is on western countries to pay for them to get clean energy if that's what they really want. Malawi? Don't develop electricity generation in Africa! You might make them less poor!

pk22 9y ago
Agree. We could use anything to have uninterrupted power for 24 hours. Although coal plants are being build but current government is also investing in hydel, solar and wind farms. I think coal will be a short term fix while we sort out economy and then focus more on renewables.
melling 9y ago
What happened to solar becoming cheaper than coal? I thought we were close. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-06-01/cheaper-solar-in-india-prompts-rethink-for-more-coal-projects https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-06-01/cheaper-s... Natural gas is cheaper than coal in the US: https://www.usnews.com/opinion/economic-intelligence/articles/2017-03-09/abundant-cheap-natural-gas-is-the-real-reason-for-the-demise-of-coal https://www.usnews.com/opinion/economic-intelligence/article...
- sfifs 9y ago
  Two words - "base load". In developing economies, sufficient base load power doesn't exist. Solar and Wind do nothing at scale when a stable base load power supply doesn't exist. SolarCity is experimenting with batteries powered by intermittent power supply in small islands but nothing at scale really exists a practical proven tech. Natural gas requires high security LNG terminal infra if you're not a producer
- thriftwy 9y ago
  I imagine it's much harder to quickly prop up solar generation than it's to build a few coal plants. You would need some backbone before you can add solar on top (e.g. what happens at night?)

guelo 9y ago

Fuck our grandkids, they can spit on our graves all they want, we need to keep the GDP growth rate positive.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
opportune 9y ago
At least the shareholders and party leaders will be happy!

Synaesthesia 9y ago

So, the US denies climate change, is not a signatory to the Paris accord, is the biggest fossil fuel user, and is now the biggest oil producer thanks to ita fracking programme. They can’t exactly be pointing fingers.