Climate change as a communist plot

China flags peak in coal usage

China’s decade-long boom in coal-driven heavy industry is about to end as the leadership shifts priorities towards energy conservation, say officials and policy advisers.

The advisers predict China’s coal consumption will peak at only a fraction above current levels after the State Council, or cabinet, last week set an ambitious new total energy use target for the five-year plan ending 2015.

“Coal consumption will peak below 4 billion tonnes,” Jiang Kejun, who led the modelling team that advised the State Council on energy use scenarios, told Fairfax Media.

“It’s time to make change,” said Dr Jiang, who is director of the Energy Research Institute under the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC). “There’s no market for further development of energy-intensive industry.”

The imminent stabilisation of coal usage, if broadly achieved, would mark a stunning turn-around for a nation that is estimated to have burned 3.9 billion tonnes last year, which is nearly as much as the rest of the world combined.

It's not clear from the article to what extent climate change concerns might be a factor behind the decision, but it would seem it must be figuring there somewhere:

Pan Jiahua, who heads a team of climate change economists at China's leading think tank, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, told Fairfax Media that the State Council’s endorsement of the energy target had the effect of elevating it into a “political requirement”.

He said officials in local governments and state-owned enterprises would now be judged partly on their ability to meet energy targets while a long list of green slogans, incentives and policies were translating into concrete measures.

Professor Pan said energy security remained the primary motivation behind the measures but last month’s record pollution readings in North China had contributed to the hardening of political will.
“Chinese people have done enough tolerating such bad air,” he said.