Cost of Coal-Fired Chinese Growth

With the nation’s 12th five-year plan currently being finalized, the question is: Can China continue to grow richer without wrecking the global environment? “Will China’s carbon dioxide emissions overwhelm the world?” asks Mark Levine, a senior staff scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California. Coal accounts for more than 70 percent of all of China’s energy. It uses more coal than the U.S., Europe and Japan combined. And, even as China adds wind farms, nuclear power plants and other electricity sources at a pace that surpasses anywhere else in the world, it is now the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases.