| Title | China's Coal Consumption Dropped for the First Time this Century | |
| Date | Thursday August 21 2014, @06:58PM | |
| Author | n1 | |
| Topic | ||
| from the kittens-are-a-more-robust-fuel dept. | ||
RT and many others report that China's coal consumption dropped for the first time in this century. These reports echo an analysis produced by Lauri Myllyvirta and Greenpeace International for the first half of this year:
China’s coal use doubled in the past 10 years, causing more than half of rapid global CO2 growth over the period, bringing the country’s per capita emissions at par with the EU and culminating in the current air pollution crisis.
[...] China’s coal consumption was seems to have dropped in the first half of 2014. The growth of imports ground almost to a halt, while domestic production dropped by 1.8% [in Chinese]. While there is uncertainty over the changes in coal stockpiles - running down stockpiles could have enabled consumption to grow while production and imports declined - stockpiles are reported to be high and increasing, making it very likely that consumption did indeed drop.
[...] Two easy short-term explanations have been offered for the slowing coal demand. The first is that China’s economic growth is slowing and coal consumption growth will resume when the economy picks up. However, there are signs that the link between coal consumption and economic growth has changed substantially. In the first five years of the century, coal use and GDP grew almost hand in hand. In the second half of last decade, while coal consumption growth remained incredibly fast, a gap opened between the growth rates of coal and GDP, widening in the first years of this decade. Finally, in the first half of 2014, the Chinese economy registered a year-on-year growth rate of 7.4% while coal consumption remained stable.
I hope that we are just witnessing the peak coal consumption in China.
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printed from SoylentNews, China's Coal Consumption Dropped for the First Time this Century on 2024-04-18 08:28:48