Chinas war on coal continues the country just canceled 104 new coal plants

[herding cats]

Because China is such a behemoth, its energy decisions absolutely dwarf anything any other country is doing right now. Case in point: Over the weekend, the Chinese government ordered 13 provinces to cancel 104 coal-fired projects in development, amounting to a whopping 120 gigawatts of capacity in all.

To put that in perspective, the United States has about 305 gigawatts of coal capacity total. The projects that China just halted are equal in size to one-third of the US coal fleet. It’s potentially a very, very big deal for efforts to fight climate change.

This also shouldn’t come as a huge surprise. In recent years, China, the world’s largest emitter of carbon dioxide, has been making major efforts to restrain its coal use and shift to cleaner sources of energy. When Donald Trump and other conservatives in the United States complain that China isn’t doing anything about climate change, they simply haven’t been paying attention.

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Increasingly, many analysts suspect that this slowdown in coal consumption is a lasting shift — particularly as China transitions away from heavy industry and investment-driven growth and into a modern service-oriented economy that’s far less carbon-intensive. Going forward, China’s economy is expected to be focused more on retail shops and hospitals, less on steel and cement plants. Energy demand will slow.

On top of that, as China’s leaders start to take global warming seriously, the country has been making massive investments in clean energy. As part of the Paris climate deal, China has pledged to get 20 percent of its energy from low-carbon sources by 2030. The government is planning to install an addition 130 gigawatts of wind and solar by 2020 — equivalent to all the renewable power in France today. (China’s also make big bets on nuclear power.) Some analysts suspect this growth in clean energy could be sufficient to satisfy much of the future growth in household electricity demand.

http://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2017/1/17/14294906/china-cancels-coal-plants

Thought we could all use some good news today.

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

1. Wonder what Drumpf

and Mitch McChinless plan to do about that.

[angrychair]

2. Coal-fired power plant

On every block....must save those coal jobs(he says jokingly knowing how ignorant republicans are)

[machoneman]

3. Sorry to say but this will put a big kink...

in McTurtle's plan to re-invigorate Big Coal. In fact, China's efforts here will spur other countries to look elsewhere for energy.

Just imagine this. If McConnell (McTurtle to me) had spend just 1/2 the time not taking Big Coal's money and instead invested his time and efforts to find new non-coal jobs for those KY workers, think how much better they'd be off today?

Ah, but that would have taken effort as opposed to just banking tons of campaign cash. That would have taken foresight, fortitude and hard work to attract new business to KY. And that would have required bucking the Big Coal owners and fighting got the little guy.

Ah, but that would have made him a DEMOCRAT, right?

Bwahahaha! You KY miners got what you deserved. Put a fork in them, they're done!