Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Foreign Policy Magazine dreams of China launching a green energy revolution through its Belt and Road initiative, as it is already doing.
Welcome to the competitive climate era
In trade, finance, development and security, governments are racing to get closer to zero.
BY CAROLYN KISSANE | FEBRUARY 8, 2021, 2:49 pm
2020 wasn’t just the year a pandemic hit the world. It was also the second hottest in history. Regions around the world have been exposed to forest fires, droughts, storms and much more. The scale of the COVID-19 challenge should have brought nations together to work together and coordinate action. In many cases, however, the diverse and shambolic responses illustrate the dysfunction of the global system when attempting to respond to a global crisis. Will climate change be a different story?
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The U.S. government, together with the private sector, can unleash and use an effective ecosystem to support advanced innovation, create employment opportunities in the burgeoning renewable energy and climate space, and promote the competitiveness of its high-tech clean energy sector. The challenge is not in the availability of technology – although the deficits remain large, especially in large-scale funding for new clean energy technologies – but in gathering the political will and economic support to move forward.
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China does not advocate improving relations with the United States; Rather, the role of the state in the economy is to be promoted beyond current control and strategic technologies are to be developed. Two terms used in China’s 14th Five-Year Plan, which spans 2021-2025, are “technological independence” and “indigenous innovation,” suggesting that China wants to question its dependence on imports, to achieve decarbonization while strengthening its position as a major exporter of advanced clean energy technologies. The Belt and Road Initiative, China’s massive international infrastructure investment project, is another focal point that is creating a silk road of green energy. China is leveraging its already-tried economic state craft for a competitive climate state craft that it can use to make and sell the environmentally friendly technology the world needs to meet all of its net-zero pledges.
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Read more: https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/02/08/welcome-to-the-era-of-competitive-climate-statecraft-united-states-china/
Back in the real world, China is funding well over 200 coal projects worldwide through its Belt and Road project and private banks.
As for domestic coal, China has not really stopped mining coal. They are trying to gasify the coal at the source and divert pollution away from their big cities
China’s risky game in converting coal
January 9, 2020 By Richard Liu, Zhou Yang and Xinzhou Qian
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While China is expected to meet its Paris commitment to reduce the share of coal in its energy mix to below 58% by 2020 – a full 10 years ahead of schedule – the country remains the world’s largest coal producer and consumer. With Chinese politics slowing down coal power for reasons of air pollution and the climate, coal mines and sub-national governments have sought alternative sources of coal demand. So we have seen a slow but steady increase in various coal conversion industries.
China is the only country that does large-scale coal conversion, converting coal into coke, fertilizer, and other chemicals (see Figure 1). Since 1998, China’s central and local governments have advanced and withdrawn the development of modern coal conversion industries such as coal-oil and coal-natural gas alternatively. As of 2017, the Chinese central government has included the conversion of coal into national planning and the “13. Five-year plan to demonstrate coal processing and use ”published. This first national strategic document on the development of coal conversion provides that coal conversion must become more environmentally friendly.
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Read more: https://www.newsecuritybeat.org/2020/01/chinas-risky-gamble-coal-conversion/
The narrative China is presenting to the world is that the “coal conversion projects” are not really about energy, but about making chemicals.
Aside from the obvious question of what the market is for all those millions of tons of additional chemicals, the reality is that China has a massive gas shortage. So it is likely that much of this “converted” coal will end up in their domestic and industrial gas pipelines, at least in the near future.
In either case, China is still consuming all of the coal it can dig up and funding hundreds of coal projects in other countries. From the evidence I’ve seen, the idea that the Belt and Road focus is on green energy is a total fantasy.
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