Keith Bradsher has filed an important story showing how the energy demands of China’s emerging consumer class are overwhelming the central government’s efforts to cut industrial energy waste and blunt growth in carbon dioxide emissions.
The article provides a closeup view of the demographic and economic forces that are destined to make Asia the dominant influence on the planetary greenhouse for decades to come, by almost every analysis.
Here’s the core of Bradsher’s piece:
Already, in the last three years, China has shut down more than a thousand older coal-fired power plants that used technology of the sort still common in the United States. China has also surpassed the rest of the world as the biggest investor in wind turbines and other clean energy technology. And it has dictated tough new energy standards for lighting and gas mileage for cars.
But even as Beijing imposes the world’s most rigorous national energy campaign, the effort is being overwhelmed by the billionfold demands of Chinese consumers.
Chinese and Western energy experts worry that China’s energy challenge could become the world’s problem — possibly dooming any international efforts to place meaningful limits on global warming.
If China cannot meet its own energy-efficiency targets, the chances of avoiding widespread environmental damage from rising temperatures “are very close to zero,” said Fatih Birol, the chief economist of the International Energy Agency in Paris.
Aspiring to a more Western standard of living, in many cases with the government’s encouragement, China’s population, 1.3 billion strong, is clamoring for more and bigger cars, for electricity-dependent home appliances and for more creature comforts like air-conditioned shopping malls. Read on….
Consider that India, while far down the list of greenhouse giants — with a fifth of China’s emissions, measured per-capita or gross — is poised for greatly expanded energy demand. If you dare, please track down and read the 2009 paper by Michael Sivak of the University of Michigan on projected air conditioning demand in big cities in hot places. A single finding is sufficient to make the point: “For example, the potential cooling demand in metropolitan Mumbai is about 24 percent of the demand for the entire United States.”
There is a tough road ahead for anyone seeking to cut emissions of greenhouse gases in a world of cresting populations and surging appetites.