So much for the Clean Green Chinese Machine

Green paint for Chairman Mao. …by Daderot

China is holding a busted flush in the Global Green Poker game. In late summer, local bureaucrats in two-thirds of China’s provinces started enforcing power-saving measures on companies, but after four weeks of rolling blackouts the middle kingdom is so desperate for coal it can’t keep pretending to be Green. The Rust Belt factories were grinding down, homes were even losing power, winter is knocking at the door and the only thing with fuel in China were the prices. It’s the worst energy crisis in a decade, and there’s no holding out for another three weeks to fool the rest of the world into thinking it cares about “carbon”.

Instead a national communist committee called the China’s National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) has apparently ordered mines to go all out — and they are. The word is that China is now digging up nearly 12 million tons of coal each and every day. If they keep this up it will be a “One Billion Ton” quarter, and potentially nearly a 4-billion-ton year. That’s about 8 times Australias entire annual production and […]