By Peter Janssen Apr 26, 2007, 9:26 GMT
Bangkok - When the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change meets in Bangkok next week to launch its third volume assessment report on mitigation of climate change, one can expect Asia's growing dependency on coal power to be on the agenda.
Led by the booming economies of China and India, Asia's increasing use of coal to satisfy its electricity needs bodes ill for the world at large, not to mention the region's teeming population.
China, for example is already the world's largest coal producer and consumer, and is well on track to becoming the global leader in greenhouse gas emissions by the year 2009. India, the world's third largest user of coal-generated electricity, expects to increase its usage five-fold by 2031 when it will become the third largest greenhouse gas producer after only China and the US.
In a world that has become increasingly aware and worried about the reality of global warming, Asian governments can expect to come under intense pressure in the near future to reduce their coal dependencies.
That said, a few other reality checks needs to be highlighted.
First, if Asian governments have been slow to accept the global warming scare, so have the much richer governments of the West.
US President George W. Bush only admitted that the world might be getting a wee bit hotter earlier this year, shortly before his former rival for the presidency won an Oscar for his harrowing documentary on global warming: An Inconvenient Truth.
But the US has still refused to sign the Kyoto Protocol, as has Australia, which just happens to be one of the world's largest user of coal (accounting for 80 per cent of its power supply) and the world's largest exporter of the dirty fuel.
The US, now the leader in carbon emissions, says it will not sign the protocol until China and India make a commitment to reduce their CO2 output.
This is a vicious and cynical cycle that both the US and Asian governments need to snap out of fast.
On the other hand, environmentalists and climate Cassandras will need to accept the reality that Asia is going to be dependent on coal to power its development for the next few decades, because it is the cheapest and most abundant fuel to power their economies.
'In Asia, for at least the next 100 years, you will have coal,' predicts Thierry Lefevre, director of The Centre for Energy Environment Resources Development. 'But instead of saying coal we should be saying clean coal.'
Many critics claim that 'clean coal' is an oxymoron, like an honest liar. A better description might be 'cleaner coal.'
Coal is definitely the dirtiest of the carbon-based fuels, which also include oil and natural gas. While all three produce carbon dioxide, CO2, the result of mixing carbon and oxygen in the burning process, coal also produces some other nasties such as sulfur and nitrogen, creating particle matter that is dangerous to the health of anyone living in a 5-kilometre-radius of such coal-burning plants.
Technologies are now available for eliminating sulfur and nitrogen particles from coal plants and the governments of Asia owe it to their populations to make sure these are used. When those technologies are used, the cost of using coal goes up, a proper reflection of the real costs of using a dirty fuel.
There is no technology available to block CO2 emissions from coal plants, nor from natural gas plants for that matter. The closest technology on the horizon is geosequestration, essentially putting CO2 emissions under the earth's crust, and anyone who finds that a sensible long term solution to global warming must have been standing out in the sun too long.
The other alternative to coal, and all fossil fuels, is renewable energies such as bio-fuel for cars, bio-mass for energy along with hydro, wind and solar.
If Asian governments want to get serious about adding renewable energies to their energy mix, and there are plenty of indications that they are, they will need to establish the policy goals and put in place tax incentives to reach them.
The European Union, for instance, has led the way in this area by setting itself a goal to reach 30 per cent renewable energy use by the year 2055.
Ironically, Europe's renewable energy frenzy is having an adverse effect on Asia by driving up the cost of these green technologies. For example, a solar energy push in Germany, a country not known for its sunny skies, has made solar technology unaffordable in Thailand, where the sun does shine.
This instance also shows that such policies work.
'It proves that through stringent policy you can change things,' says energy consultant Lefevre. 'You can change the paradigm. We are not doomed to use hydrocarbons.'
Nor nuclear, one hopes, although don't count on it.
But one of the first things nearly every Asia government should do first, in the face of a hotter global environment and rising criticisms of their growing CO2 contributions, is to simply improve the efficiency of their existing energy grids.
Although efficiency drives don't grab headlines, and don't translate into lucrative mega-projects for politicians, they can save countries up to 50 per cent on their energy use.
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