[greenyes] Global Warming - China Factor

["Peter Anderson" <anderson@no.address>]

When reading this article below, one thing needs to be kept in mind that is 
not dealt within the piece.

It has always seemed to me that their is a very substantial difference 
between stating, correctly, that an effective global warming treaty has to 
include the industrializing countries, especially China, which Kyoto does 
not, on the one hand, and responding by either:

    (1) Concluding that nothing substantive more should be done (Bush); as 
opposed to,

    (2) Concluding that efforts need to be redoubled to extend Kyoto to 
China at the earliest possible time (Kerry).

The Kyoto drafters were not ignorant of this issue, but rather the press to 
get a treaty in motion resulted in pushing off the China issue to another 
day.




CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR

 from the December 23, 2004 edition - 
http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/1223/p01s04-sten.html

New coal plants bury 'Kyoto'
New greenhouse-gas emissions from China, India, and the US will swamp cuts 
from the Kyoto treaty.
By Mark Clayton | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

So much for Kyoto.

The official treaty to curb greenhouse-gas emissions hasn't gone into effect 
yet and already three countries are planning to build nearly 850 new 
coal-fired plants, which would pump up to five times as much carbon dioxide 
into the atmosphere as the Kyoto Protocol aims to reduce.

The magnitude of that imbalance is staggering. Environmentalists have long 
called the treaty a symbolic rather than practical victory in the fight 
against global warming. But even many of them do not appear aware of the 
coming tidal wave of greenhouse-gas emissions by nations not under Kyoto 
restrictions.

By 2012, the plants in three key countries - China, India, and the United 
States - are expected to emit as much as an extra 2.7 billion tons of carbon 
dioxide, according to a Monitor analysis of power-plant construction data. 
In contrast, Kyoto countries by that year are supposed to have cut their CO2 
emissions by some 483 million tons.

The findings suggest that critics of the treaty, including the Bush 
administration, may be correct when they claim the treaty is hopelessly 
flawed because it doesn't limit emissions from the developing world. But 
they also suggest that the world is on the cusp of creating a huge new 
infrastructure that will pump out enormous amounts of CO2 for the next six 
decades.

Without strong US leadership, it's unlikely that technology to cut CO2 
emissions will be ready in time for the power-plant construction boom, many 
say.

"If all those power plants are online by 2012, then obviously it completely 
cancels out any gains from Kyoto," says Gavin Schmidt, a climate modeler 
with the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, part of the National 
Aeronautics and Space Administration.

The reason for the dramatic imbalance is coal. Just a few years ago, 
economists and environmentalists still pictured a world shifting steadily 
from "dirty" coal-fired power plants to "cleaner" natural-gas turbines. But 
the fast-rising price of natural gas and other factors abruptly changed that 
picture. Now the world is facing a tidal wave of new power plants fired by 
coal, experts say. "China and India are building coal-fired capacity as fast 
as they can," says Christopher Bergesen, who tracks power plant construction 
for Platts, the energy publishing division of McGraw- Hill.

China is the dominant player. The country is on track to add 562 coal-fired 
plants - nearly half the world total of plants expected to come online in 
the next eight years. India could add 213such plants; the US, 72. (See chart 
below.)

"..."

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