Before a large international audience in Shanghai for the World Expo, the director of China's National Energy Administration pledged to begin shutting down his country's coal-burning power plants and give "greater priority to the development of clean and low-carbon energies."

If only that were true. Just two days later, the China Daily newspaper boisterously boasted that coal imports more than doubled in the year's first five months, compared to the same period in 2009.

Pious official proclamations for foreign audiences are quite common in China. In the spring, Premier Wen Jiabao vowed, "we can never break our pledge, stagger our resolution or weaken our efforts," to use energy more efficiently. Soon after, the government issued an internal statement saying energy efficiency -- the amount of coal or oil burned to generate each ampere of electricity -- had actually declined this year.

China is addicted to coal. Already it acquires 70 percent of its energy from burning coal, and it's building new coal-fired power plants at a breakneck pace.

This year, southern China battled a torrid heat wave, pushing the burgeoning middle class to buy and use more and more air conditioners. A China Daily photo showed a Panda at the zoo, stretched out, asleep, atop a giant block of ice. At the same time, a drought left river levels in the southwest too low to power hydro-electric generators. So China mined, imported and burned more and more coal -- and consequently recorded the largest six-month increase in greenhouse-gas emissions ever registered.

Doesn't anyone see the paradox?

Recently, the International Energy Agency published data showing that China is now the world's largest consumer of energy. Three years ago, China became the world's largest carbon-dioxide emitter. And while, in a public speech, Premier Wen threatened to use an "iron hand" to control inefficient, runaway energy use, at the same time his government launched a new five-year plan to mine 25 percent more coal, 3.6 billion tons, by 2015.

The U.S. Energy Information Administration projects that Chinese coal consumption will more than double over the next 25 years, as will the nation's carbon-dioxide emissions. At that point, the projections say, China will emit more greenhouse gases than the rest of the world combined.

Meantime, the United States is no saint.

Almost 45 percent of the nation's energy comes from burning coal -- a figure that the government projects will remain relatively stable in the years ahead. Late last week, Senate Democrats announced that they would not take up climate-change legislation this year, which means, given the politics of the moment, that the bill is effectively dead. Still, the Energy Information agency projects that greenhouse-gas emissions will increase by just two-tenths of 1 percent a year in the U.S. -- and 2.7 percent in China, 13 times more.

So what does all of this mean? The rest of the world, 194 of the 195 nations, could meet the most aggressive climate-change goals imaginable -- pull greenhouse-gas emissions back to 1970s levels -- and it would make little difference as long as China heedlessly burns more and more coal.

Glaciers would continue to melt, river levels would continue to fall, heat waves would grow more commonplace. All because of China. And if you read what the Chinese say among themselves, they revel in their coal culture.

A few weeks ago, the China National Coal Machinery Association awarded its 2010 best coal-machinery awards. The government said it would soon found a national coal-price index, to help traders and buyers more accurately follow price fluctuations. And Guo Yuntao, a vice director of the State Administration of Work Safety, boasted that China would soon become the world's largest coal importer. (Guo ought to pay more attention to his agency's primary goal, safety. About 2,500 people die in China's coal mines each year, 13 just last weekend -- the world's worst death rate.)

David Fridley, an expert on Chinese energy use at the Lawrence Berkeley National Labs, said he believes the American projections for China are probably exaggerated. But he also told me, "there's no scalable energy form in China that could offset the use of coal."

The truth is, China doesn't really want to change. Pan Jiahua, a government energy advisor, voiced the longstanding, still prevailing, view when he told the BBC: "We need to develop, so we need lots of energy. We should be allowed to emit more than the rich world," at least "until CO2 emissions stabilize."

By then it will be too late.

Joel Brinkley, a professor of journalism at Stanford University, is a former Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign correspondent for the New York Times

 

Available at Amazon.com:

The Great Gamble

At War with the Weather: Managing Large-Scale Risks in a New Era of Catastrophes

 

 

(C) 2010 Joel Brinkley