THE Lowly Peon

Coal Exports to China Up 1000x Since Last Year

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22 November 2010, 2:42am

This is beyond horrifying. To think that we're making such an effort to cut carbon emissions, in large part by cutting back our nasty coal habit, yet we're exporting millions of tons of coal to China and acting like it's their problem, not ours.

Last year, the United States exported only 2,714 tons of coal to China, according to the United States Energy Information Administration. Yet that figure soared to 2.9 million tons in the first six months of this year alone — huge growth, though still a minuscule fraction of China’s coal imports.

This summer an Australian company signed a $60 billion contract with a state enterprise, China Power International Development, to supply coal to Chinese power stations [...]

The deal points to the love-hate relationship many wealthier countries have with coal: while environmental laws have made it progressively harder to build new coal-fired power plants, they do not restrict coal mining to the same extent.

That is partly because emissions accounting standards focus on where a fuel is burned, not where it is dug up; because the coal trade is a lucrative business; and because the labor-intensive mining industry creates jobs.