Overpopulation and the enviornmental impact of all this

djpbarry wrote: »

Not really - China's making a pretty dramatic shift away from coal and towards renewables and nuclear.

It is?

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/nov/20/coal-plants-world-resources-institute

This map- http://www.theguardian.com/environment/picture/2012/nov/20/which-countries-most-coal-power

http://www.wri.org/blog/majority-china%E2%80%99s-proposed-coal-fired-power-plants-located-water-stressed-regions


Even though it has cut back on some coal plants in Beijing China may still add hundreds of new coal power plants.

Nuclear and renewables are small fry compared to coal power generation. Coal power currently provides 750 GW in China with up to 500 GW to be added or not in the future.

Nuclear will be at about 50-60 GW investment at the end of this decade. China has added a huge amount of renewables but the easy hydro stuff has been done , wind could go up to 200 GW but as we all know wind can not act as base load.

And India is going to cause even more headaches than China, with less economic power and more pressure to generate cheap electricity now.

Both China and India have very significant coal resources.

So the situation is complex in China, with both good and bad developments at the same time.

Unfortunately the world is going to see a lot more dirty coal power plants being built, if not in China then in India and other countries.

India is going to be the big problem with over 500 GW of coal plants in planning and likely to be built. I've talked with educated Indians before and they believe that CO2 taxes are trying to 'keep India down', they would rather choke in the coal dust and pollution.

Renewables are a good news story that are hiding a very bad news story in plain sight.

http://www.carbonbrief.org/blog/2013/12/five-graphs-that-tell-the-future-story-of-coal/

China is now importing roughly as much seaborne coal as the rest of the world combined - and its coal consumption is expected to grow by another 17 per cent over the next five years. Overall, China alone will account for half the expected growth in coal demand to 2018, as this chart shows:

Source: IEA presentation

Even that startling growth is a slight downgrade from previous predictions. The country's government is making efforts to reduce its dependency on coal and use energy more efficiently - for example by introducing new carbon trading systems in seven separate regions.

But the IEA says these efforts are likely to be at least partially offset by the growth of China's middle class, which is demanding more and more power. So while coal demand will grow a bit slower, it's still going up.

The_Captain wrote: »

Jesus, the state of the 'facts' people are banging on about in this thread

[MOD] So produce some facts of your own then. [/MOD]