coal fired power stations

Vergeet de retoriek van de klimaatovereenkomst van Parijs. De realiteit laat een ander beeld zien: 1600 nieuwe kolengestookte elektriciteitscentrales in de planning of aanbouw in de wereld.

In een recent interview met Christiane Amanpour (CNN) verklaarde de voormalige VN-klimaatonderhandelaar, Christiane Figueres, dat China had besloten om 100 kolengestookte elektriciteitscentrales minder te bouwen dan het aanvankelijk van plan was. Daarmee werd de suggestie gewekt dat China een voortrekkersrol in de wereld speelde wat betreft de vermindering van de CO2-uitstoot. Het was een uitspraak die symptomatisch is voor de misleidende klimaatpropaganda die dagelijks over ons wordt uitgestort.

Onder de titel, ‘As Beijing Joins Climate Fight, Chinese Companies Build Coal Plants’, rapporteerde Hiroko Tabuchi in ‘The New York Times’:

When China halted plans for more than 100 new coal-fired power plants this year, even as President Trump vowed to “bring back coal” in America, the contrast seemed to confirm Beijing’s new role as a leader in the fight against climate change.

But new data on the world’s biggest developers of coal-fired power plants paints a very different picture: China’s energy companies will make up nearly half of the new coal generation expected to go online in the next decade.

These Chinese corporations are building or planning to build more than 700 new coal plants at home and around the world, some in countries that today burn little or no coal, according to tallies compiled by Urgewald, an environmental group based in Berlin. Many of the plants are in China, but by capacity, roughly a fifth of these new coal power stations are in other countries.

Over all, 1,600 coal plants are planned or under construction in 62 countries, according to Urgewald’s tally, which uses data from the Global Coal Plant Tracker portal. The new plants would expand the world’s coal-fired power capacity by 43 percent.

The fleet of new coal plants would make it virtually impossible to meet the goals set in the Paris climate accord, which aims to keep the increase in global temperatures from preindustrial levels below 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit.

Electricity generated from fossil fuels like coal is the biggest single contributor globally to the rise in carbon emissions …

Lees verder hier.

Voor mijn eerdere bijdragen over klimaat en aanverwante zaken zie hierhier, hier, hier en hier.