Looks like these two nations see the hype behind the climate change scare and see it for what it is. Political and not scientific. From Watts Up With That comes this essay with some inconvenient numbers:
China and India rejecting renewables for coal-fired futures
China and India are NOT buying into the global alarm movement. Never in human history have we seen two countries (China and India), each with over a billion people, in need of such gargantuan amounts of energy to keep their economies accelerating and their citizens alive.
China and India are the two most populous countries in the world. As of 2018, China had almost 1.4 billion people, a figure that is projected to grow to 1.5 billion by 2045. India accounted for approximately 1.3 billion people in 2018 and is expected to grow to almost 1.7 billion by 2045.
Though China has spent more on clean energy than any other country and is pushing to burn natural gas (a different fossil fuel) instead of coal to counter smog, it’s still pumping money at home and abroad into coal-fired generation.
Bloomber reports that China has enough coal-fired power plants in the pipeline to match the entire capacity of the European Union, driving the expansion in global coal power and confounding the movement against the polluting fossil fuel.
Over half (5,884) of the world’s coal power plants (10,210) are in China and India whose populations of mostly poor peoples is roughly 2.7 billion. Together they are in the process of building 634 new ones. They are putting their money and backs into their most abundant source of energy – coal.
More at the site.
Makes a lot of sense - coal is cheap, abundant and we have about 500 years of known reserves at the current rate of consumption. We would be foolish not to use it - especially developing nations who do not have the financial resources to blow taxpayer money on pie-in-the-sky scams schemes for elusive magic unicorn energy. Coal in its native state is not a clean fuel but the scrubbing technology is mature and cheap to implement - even cheaper when integrating it into a new plant. You would be stupid not to use it.
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