In December 2016, the Center for American Progress brought a group of energy experts to China to find out what is really happening…
We found that the nation’s coal sector is undergoing a massive transformation that extends from the mines to the power plants, from Ordos to Shanghai. China is indeed going green. The nation is on track to overdeliver on the emissions reduction commitments it put forward under the Paris climate agreement, and making coal cleaner is an integral part of the process.
The study emphasizes pollution from coal power: “vary dramatically based on the type of coal and coal-burning technology used.” And Chinese coal power plants are being upgraded to burn cleaner and more efficiently.
efforts fall roughly along two paths: one, building cleaner plants, and two, cleaning up or shutting down existing dirty plants.
And cleaner still than coal is natural gas. China has limited supplies, but continues to increase LNG imports. “China’s LNG imports continue to rise,” (LNG World News, March 23, 2017) notes:
China, world’s largest energy consumer and the third-biggest LNG importer, boosted its imports of the chilled fuel in February by 28.5 percent year-on-year.
China’s LNG imports increased to 2.37 million mt in February when compared to 1.85 million mt in the same month in 2016, according to the General Administration of Customs data.
The country’s imports rose to 3.44 million mt in January, the second-highest monthly import level, behind a record 3.73 million mt set the month before as a cold snap across the country spurred demand.
According to Xinhua, Beijing has become the country’s first city to have all its power plants fuelled by natural gas, an objective laid out in 2013 in the capital’s five-year clean air action plan.
Whether for political or commercial reasons, Chinese counterparties are not offtakers of any U.S. LNG export project under construction. Regardless of past U.S. policy, it is now clear that Chinese buyers are welcome to sign deals with current or future U.S. LNG exporters. It also appears that concerns about the impact U.S. LNG exports would have on the domestic price of natural gas have been abated with Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross indicating that officials from Dow Chemical “gave assurances that increasing exports of natural gas wouldn’t harm the U.S. industry or consumers if sales remained less than 30 percent of total output.”
China has a long way to go in replacing current coal power with hydro, solar, wind, and natural gas power sources:
Leading energy consultancy Wood Mackenzie is also bullish on Chinese LNG demand, noting, “By 2030, we expect Chinese LNG demand to reach 75 mmtpa, triple 2016 imports. This is equivalent to $26bn a year at today’s prices ($7/mmBtu), and the U.S. is keen for a slice of the pie.”
Unfortunately, even with China’s cleaner coal plants and increasing natural gas and renewable energy sources, very dirty coal plants and even home coal burning continues outside Beijing, and pollution released still drifts to Beijing skies. “Blue skies return to Beijing, but dangerous smog still blankets northern China,” (Reuters, December 22, 2016) reports that though Beijing skies cleared:
…high readings are still being recorded in other parts of northern China, including parts of the major metropolis of Tianjin which sits next to Beijing, and the province of Hebei that surrounds Beijing.
The Chinese government has long provided inexpensive heat during the country’s cold winters:
The country’s northern provinces mostly rely on the burning of hundreds of millions of tonnes of coal each year for heating.
Natural gas and electricity can be substitutes for coal in heating buildings in north China, the official Xinhua News Agency reported, citing President Xi Jinping as saying at a government meeting on Wednesday.
Creative Commons “Coal Delivery Bicycle” by Gwendolyn Stansbury, May 15, 2015, is licensed under CC BY 2.0
Reducing emissions from heating would be among the most effective ways to limit winter smog besides cleaning up industry… Coal-burning by households is particularly dirty because it often happens without the emissions filtering required in power plants. …
But Ms. Gao, whose husband earns about $500 a month at an auto plant, soon noticed a downside.
“Electric heating has become our family’s biggest expense,” Ms. Gao said. She said she may seek a job to help pay the bill.
Despite electricity subsidies for residential consumers, villagers interviewed about their state-supplied heaters said their overall costs had risen substantially. Several said it costs around $300 to heat their homes for the winter, compared with about $200 with coal.
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Long simmering tensions between China and formerly colonial powers, especially Imperial Japan, continue to influence trade, investment, and cultural relations, and also influence Chinese movies.
The pro-Japanese guy gets thrashed, but viewers not understanding Cantonese (spoken in Hong Kong and nearby southern China) might be confused by the conversation that follows the fight.
I watched the movie on Netflix and by accident had both English dubbing and subtitles turned on. You’d think dubbing and subtitles would tell a similar story. Not here.
Comments after the fight are very different in subtitles than spoken English. (Cantonese speakers will know which is more accurate. And I’d be curious how Mandarin dubbing and subtitles are translated for this scene, and through the movie.)
In the screen captures below, readers can (barely) read the white subtitles.
The good guy (at left) in the subtitles, sort of apologizes for winning the fight:
My victory was pure luck.
You’ve come a long way. You must be very tired.
If we have the chance, next time how about I pay you a visit?
Very diplomatic, trying to ease tensions after the conflict. Maybe a nice metaphor for improving China/Japan economic and cultural relations after past conflicts.
Whoever managed the English dubbing though, didn’t get the memo. Those listening in English hear instead:
“Understand something, if you are looking for a fight at [martial arts academy]…
“…you are asking for trouble. You, or the Japanese.”
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“Behind China’s $1 Trillion Plan to Shake Up the Economic Order,” (New York Times, May 13, 2017) profiles China’s massive infrastructure spending across Asia, Africa, and parts of Europe. China’s government has funded vast infrastructure projects across China extending now beyond its borders into Laos, Myanmar, Vietnam, Indonesia and beyond:
Chinese money is building power plants in Pakistan to address chronic electricity shortages, part of an expected $46 billion worth of investment.
Chinese planners are mapping out train lines from Budapest to Belgrade, Serbia, providing another artery for Chinese goods flowing into Europe through a Chinese-owned port in Greece.
The massive infrastructure projects, along with hundreds of others across Asia, Africa and Europe, form the backbone of China’s ambitious economic and geopolitical agenda… creating new markets for the country’s construction companies and exporting its model of state-led development in a quest to create deep economic connections and strong diplomatic relationships.
Whether these infrastructure investments become profitable and improve trade relationships, or languish unfinished and underused, will be revealed in the coming years and decades. Both governments and private firms can spend tens of billions building infrastructure but in the wrong place, the wrong way, or at the wrong time.
As an ambitious engineering project with a price tag of billions that ran into complex difficulties, the Channel tunnel may hold lessons in the debate over the merits of other complex and expensive infrastructure projects in the making. …
“It’s a wonderful thing from which we’ve all benefited, apart from the people who paid for it to be built who lost substantially all their money,” said Douglas McNeill, investment director and analyst at Charles Stanley.
“It’s a salutary reminder of the dangers of over-optimism when it comes to major infrastructure projects.”
China’s new infrastructure spending may help the hundreds of millions still impoverished in Laos, Pakistan, and nearby countries prosper from new roads, rail lines, and ports connecting them to the world economy. Or these investments may turn out to be over-optimistic or poorly conceived and designed, as many argue government-funded infrastructure has been within China over the last decade. “Why China keeps throwing trillions in investments down the drain,” (Fortune, December 1, 2014) reports:
The delivery rate of completed capital projects, which was 74-79% in the late 1990s, has now fallen below 60%. This implies that nearly 40% of Chinese investment projects are either not finished on time or not completed at all.
The even more alarming figure, which made headlines around the world, is that ineffective investment has cost China $10.8 trillion since 1997. Sixty-two percent of the wasteful investment—$6.8 trillion—was made after 2009, when China went on an investment binge to stimulate its economy.
How much spending by Chinese central and provincial government banks building factories, housing, and infrastructure inside China over the last decade has been for good and how much poor investments? Only time will tell. Much depends upon returns earned from factories, housing, office buildings, railways, dams, coal, solar, wind power installations, ports and airports, and highways.
The next trillion dollars spent building transportation infrastructure across Asia, Africa and Europe will face similar market tests, as revenue generated may or may not pay for the cost of design and construction.
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… Local companies had agreed to guarantee hundreds of millions of dollars of one another’s loans. When some of those loans went bad, the impact rippled across the city.
Zouping’s plight offers a sobering example of the problems that could lurk within China’s vast and murky debt load. A nearly decade-long Chinese lending spree drove growth but burdened the economy with one of the world’s heaviest debt loads, equal to $21,600 worth of bank loans, bonds and other obligations for every man, woman and child in the country. Debt in China has expanded twice as fast as the overall economy since 2008.
Already, a big rebound in “shadow finance,” primarily bank-mediated company-to-company loans, is papering over the cracks in China, blunting the impact of the tighter corporate bond market. While corporate bond debt outstanding fell by 58 billion yuan ($8.4 billion) in the first quarter of 2017, shadow finance ballooned by more than 2 trillion yuan, nearly twice as much as in the fourth quarter of 2016.
As the US/China topic debate season draws to a close, it looks like the long predicted collapse of the Chinese economy won’t happen in May or June. The key question is how much Chinese government banks loaning to state-owned enterprises, combined with casino like shadow lending has distorted the still-expanding Chinese economy.
This new-found anxiety is a blow to a market that had started to recover in 2016 from the liability web that entangled local governments and their financing vehicles after 2008. Despite not seeing any defaults, LGFV bonds became the poster children for China’s ballooning debt problem. For many investors, the debt is symbolic of the country’s excesses in the wake of the global financial crisis, when municipalities — barred from issuing bonds on their own — used the vehicles as a way of meeting funding shortfalls.
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All developed countries have mixed economies, partly market-based with private property, and partly government owned, managed, and regulated. The economic mixture varies from country to country, and often within countries. (In India the province of Kerala has long been run by communists, while Gujarat, for example, has pro-market policies.)
China’s centrally-administered state-owned enterprises (SOEs) have a promising future in boosting mass entrepreneurship and innovation, Premier Li Keqiang has said.
Premier Li said he believes centrally-administered SOEs have more potential and opportunity in implementing mass entrepreneurship and innovation as they are rich in technology, talent, capital and resources.
Government owned and managed enterprises have a mixed record across the world, with a great many expensive failures. Next door to China is South Korean, fifty years ago an impoverished country recovering from war and partition, and suffering from misguided economic policies.
In the years immediately after the war, South Korea’s disastrous economic policies produced alarming inflation and food shortages.
Economic advisors from the U.S. made things worse with poor economic advice. An economics professor from Dartmouth described his early work advising the South Korean government on collecting taxes. Theater owners were fudging attendance figures to reduce tax payments. So U.S. advisors recommended the government set taxes on the number of seats in each theater rather than claimed number of moviegoers. Before long tax revenues from theaters again fell, and South Koreans were sitting on the floor to watch movies.
The John Tamny review of The New Koreans reference early misadventures with state owned enterprises:
Mr. Breen also suggests that the South’s growth began with dictator Park Chung-hee’s “guided capitalism” in the 1960s, but, as he later acknowledges, the companies supported by Park “almost all failed.”
Still, advocated of government “guidance” and direction of economic development see success story in Japan, Taiwan, Singapore, and South Korea, all of which had heavy government involvement in their early stages of economic development. Market advocates argue most of these interventions were and are misguided, diverting resources and subsidizing failures, and slowing authentic economic development.
With mixed economies like South Korea and China (as well as Japan, Taiwan and Singapore), successes and failures can be credited and blamed on either private enterprise or government’s guiding hand, often depending upon the preferences and preconceptions of researchers. The South Korean government aided major family-owned corporations (called chaebols). The Foreign Policy article, “Success Story in South Korea” was published in 1969.
[WSJ]You argue that China’s state-owned enterprises don’t have the power that their opponents say they do. What’s your proof?
[Lardy] SOEs appear to be a relatively small portion of the Chinese economy. They account for between one-third and one-quarter of GDP. But in manufacturing, SOEs only account for 20% of output. In some parts of the Chinese economy, the private sector has largely displaced state companies.
[WSJ] You also say the notion that China flourishes because of “state capitalism” is outmoded. Why?
[Lardy] State capitalism means a high degree of state ownership of production, a great deal of control over investment, a great deal of control of the banking sector and a very substantial use of industrial policy. I don’t think the term ‘state capitalism’ fits China very well because its industrial policy has been an almost complete failure.
The return on assets of state firms is plummeting. It was around 3.7% in 2013, which is less than half the cost of capital
“Debt Crisis Shakes Chinese Town, Pointing to Wider Problems,” (New York Times, April 25, 2017) suggest that continued government bank financing of favored state enterprises resulted in private enterprises resorting to complex and risky cross-company debt:
One of the paradoxes of China’s debt troubles is that the country is awash in debt, yet publicly listed or privately held companies can find it hard to borrow. The state-controlled banking system lends mainly to state-owned enterprises, which can seem like a good credit risk because they have implicit government guarantees.
In response, private companies often band together, guaranteeing one another’s borrowings, to give bank credit officers more confidence that loans will be repaid. The downside is that if one company runs into trouble, it can drag down the other companies that guaranteed its debts. Those other companies, in turn, can set off their own credit guarantees from yet more companies with no direct connection to the first one.
China’s economic slowdown is hampering municipalities’ ability to support the 5.6 trillion yuan ($818 billion) of outstanding onshore notes sold by local government financing vehicles, which ballooned after the financial crisis when they used them to meet funding shortfalls. The notes offer an improvement over LGFV bonds because of cash-flow visibility, analysts said.
The vast overinvestment in steel and aluminum production as well as shipbuilding and other heavy industrial enterprises across China were built on enthusiastic local government support and debt.
Until last year the Yangzhou Guoyu Shipbuilding Company was a bustling village of 6000 workers striving to fulfil worldwide orders for new ships.
Today, in a scene repeated across China’s industrial heartlands, the yard stands silent but for the howling of stray dogs around its deserted docks. Outside the closed gates is a ghost town of abandoned workers’ dormitories, closed restaurants and crumbling internet cafes.
Much of Yizheng’s 27km stretch along the Yangtze’s northern bank 320km upriver from Shanghai is now a wasteland, where idle cranes loom half-seen through choking grey haze.
Unfinished hulks of ships are left to rust.
China’s central and regional government’s enthusiasm about shipbuilding since 2000, partly as a way to absorb massive new steel production, fueled the current collapse:
Shipbuilding became a symbol of China’s industrial might in the early 2000s, when Beijing vowed to transform its modest shipbuilding sector into the world’s largest producer by 2015 — then did it five years ahead of plan. …
The result is that China’s private sector shipyards have been virtually wiped from the map, while Beijing is keeping only the most viable state-run yards alive with subsidies. …
Chinese shipyards capable of building large ocean-going vessels have roughly halved in number since 2013 to about 70, he said, while hundreds of smaller shipyards have gone bust.
So, against the optimistic claim: “China’s centrally-administered state-owned enterprises (SOEs) have a promising future in boosting mass entrepreneurship and innovation…” is the reality of failed enterprises championed and funded in the past by local and central government bonds and banks.
The steel, aluminum, and ships exported and sold below cost in world markets have likely left a hole vast and deep of unpayable debt across China.
Local governments’ fiscal woes come as they face the prospect of either continuing to support highly indebted state-owned enterprises, especially in steel and coal, or allowing them to close and taking on the burden of additional pensions, unemployment benefits and unpaid debt.
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Public Forum Debate – 2017 Nationals PF Topic Area: Africa Resolved: In East Africa, the United States federal government should prioritize its counterterrorism efforts over its humanitarian assistance.
Kenya is one of the largest recipients of U.S. security assistance in sub-Saharan Africa. Through both State and Defense Department accounts, the Kenyan government has received over $141 million in security assistance funds since 2010—an amount that rose to $100 million in 2015 alone. Most of this financing is directed towards counterterrorism support,…
This expensive, Department of State-led program, which is now integrated into the military’s U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM), boasts lackluster oversight and a penchant for nation-building –‒ using multiple agencies to rebuild a given country’s political, economic and social infrastructure. In fact, its shape and language resembles failed, Cold War anticommunism programs in Latin America that ended up complicating rather than solving American security problems. (Full Issue Brief pdf here.)
This Issue Brief reviews the long history of U.S. government spending in Africa:
Under the Alliance for Progress, the U.S. government provided billions of dollars in economic aid, military equipment and civil assistance over the course of 10 years in the hope the funds would grow democratic institutions and undermine the appeal of communism. …
Despite past failures, prevailing wisdom once again says U.S. national security policies must target the ideology behind the threat in developing nations through taxpayer-funded development and modernization programs.
A connection to the current China policy topic is reported in “China’s Geostrategic Search for Oil,” (pdf) (The Washington Quarterly, Summer 2012, p. 84), with Sudan as a source for 15 percent of China’s oil imports:
Figures for 2010 reveal that 23 percent of China’s offshore equity oil production was in Kazakhstan, 15 percent in both Sudan and Venezuela, 14 percent in Angola, five percent in Syria, …
Nowhere else in Africa do China’s financial, diplomatic and geopolitical interests confront as much risk as they do in South Sudan. Beijing has invested billions of dollars in the country’s oil sector, deployed about 1,000 troops to serve as U.N. peacekeepers and committed considerable diplomatic capital to help resolve the ongoing civil/ethnic war.
Sudan Tribune reports “China controls 75% of oil investment in Sudan: minister,” (August 3, 2016). Note that this article is about China investment in Sudan, which is separate from earlier investment in South Sudan oil fields:
Sudan lost 75% of its oil reserves after the southern part of the country became an independent nation in July 2011, denying the north billions of dollars in revenues. Oil revenue constituted more than half of the Sudan’s revenue and 90% of its exports.
The young, troubled country of South Sudan was admitted to the East African Community (EAC) as its sixth member (the others being Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, Burundi, and Rwanda).
Being admitted to the regional body means that South Sudan will enjoy all the economic benefits the club currently has to offer (freer movement of labour and capital and, in principle, free trade) and will join the members as they move to increase economic integration (through a monetary union) and eventually establish a single political federation.
South Sudan applied for membership to the EAC as soon as it gained independence in 2011. However, its application was declined because of the country’s institutional weakness.
East Africa has been the fastest-growing region on the continent over the past decade, but trade between the United States and the region’s main economies remains limited. In 2014, Kenya, Rwanda, Ethiopia, Tanzania, Uganda, and Burundi all had higher growth rates than the United States. Despite this growth, U.S. trade with the region has been marginal and represents only 5% of total East African trade. East Africa’s main trading partners are China, India, and the European Union (EU).
Regional integration has played a key role in boosting intra-East African trade and increasing the region’s access to global markets. The East African Community (EAC), a regional economic community that was originally founded in 1967 and revived in 2000, is the leading regional organization on the continent. Since 2000, the EAC has gradually reduced tariffs, trade barriers, and bottlenecks in the region, helping members increase their trade performance.
Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto, in a short video “Markets Without Borders,” argues that the legal exclusion of most Africans from formal rule of law institutions restricts their options for engaging in world markets. DeSoto argues that one-third of the world’s population lacks access to the rule of law, and elites of the world tend not to be bothered by that. The video looks at the informals of Tanzania as well as Peru.
DeSoto argues, at 1:30 (one minute, thirty seconds) into the Markets Without Bordersthat without access to legal institutions, the poor in Africa and other countries are “left out as orphans” and “will end up bringing civilization down:”
Globalization is a civilisation in the making. Civilization has always been designed by elites. And the tendency of elites has always been to feel that if it just covers themselves and maybe the top ten to twenty percent, it’s alright.
If globalization doesn’t create the space required for those who are excluded to come in. Does not give them the instruments, the tools with which to prosper, they will be left out as orphans. And these orphans will end up bringing civilization down.
Long a territorially focused group with quasi-governmental ambitions to impose Sharia law at home, al-Shabab is now becoming a more mobile, networked regional presence.
This has brought it a number of benefits. Al-Shabab’s growing reach along the African coast is providing valuable new sources of funding and recruits.
This is a logical adaptation: enhanced global counter-terror finance efforts have strangled funding from the Somali diaspora, amongst other international sources.
In terms of recruitment, as foreign fighters have been drawn to Syria, the group has been overshadowed on the global stage.
Yet al-Shabab has stepped up its Swahili-language propaganda – which plays on deep-seated social, economic and political grievances in East African states.
At a time when the United States has grown increasingly alarmed at the spread of Islamic extremism in Africa — from Boko Haram in Nigeria to al Qaeda in the Sahel region to the Islamic State in Libya — the resilience of al-Shabab has highlighted the limits of the Obama administration’s approach to counterterrorism on the continent. American drone strikes, coupled with financial and material assistance to a 22,000-strong African Union peace enforcement mission (AMISOM), have succeeded in driving al-Shabab from most urban areas. But those policies have not prevented the group from continuing to strike civilian, government, and AU targets as it seeks to expel AMISOM and establish an Islamic state in Somalia.
So these reports look at terrorism concerns in East Africa. What about recent humanitarian concerns? “East Africa Summit to Focus on Refugees, Food Concerns,” (Voice of America, March 21, 2017) reports:
Kenya plans to shut the Dadaab refugee camp by the end of May. Dadaab is home to more than 300,000 refugees, most of them Somalis. Tens of thousands have already returned to Somalia.
Humanitarian agencies are currently struggling to save lives in Somalia, where more than 6 million people need assistance because of drought and insurgent attacks. The aid agencies warn if nothing is done, the crisis in Somalia may become worse than the 2011 famine.
The United Nations estimates more than 17 million people need humanitarian assistance in East Africa.
“Kenya, having taken into consideration its national security interests, has decided that hosting of refugees has come to an end,” Kibicho said, pointing to threats, such as the terror group Al-Shabaab.
Kenya announced the closure of refugee camps last year for the same reasons but backed down in the face of international pressure
At the time, government officials were not clear where they expected the refugees to go, other than somewhere into Somalia and out of Kenya. Kibicho’s statement didn’t address the question of where the refugees would go.
An alternative approach to refugees is found in another East African country, Uganda, as explained in: “Refugee economies – the Ugandan model,” (IREN, June 30, 2014):
Uganda has a relatively liberal policy towards its 387,000 refugees and asylum-seekers, most of whom have fled conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and South Sudan. Uganda does not have refugee camps as such, but most live in designated refugee settlements where there are allocated plots of land to farm. They can, however, get permission to live outside these settlements if they think they can support themselves, and Kampala in particular has a sizeable refugee population.
Betts told IRIN: “Uganda is a relatively positive case in that it allows the right to work and a significant degree of freedom of movement. That isn’t to say that it’s perfect, but it’s definitely towards the positive end of the spectrum. The reason we chose it is that it shows what’s possible when refugees are given basic economic freedoms.”
Recent displacement from Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, South Sudan, and Somalia has increased the number of refugees in the world to 15.4 million. Significantly, some 10.2 million of these people are in protracted refugee situations. In other words, they have been in limbo for at least 5 years, with an average length of stay in exile of nearly 20 years. Rather than transitioning from emergency relief to long-term reintegration, displaced populations too often get trapped within the system.
Uganda’s “Self-Reliance” policy for refugees offers a promising model for other countries struggling with incoming refugees:
‘Self-reliance’ policy allows refugees freedom of movement, as well as the right to work or run a business. The economic lives of refugees in Uganda, how they interact with the private sector and how they use technology challenged five myths about refugees.
Ian Johnson, a China correspondent, took out his phone to check Air Matters, an app that measures air quality based on the Environmental Protection Agency’s Air Quality Index, which scores the air from 0 to 500. Over 300 and the air is “hazardous.”
The NYT post says Trump Administration actions on coal power CO2 emissions will hurt efforts to reduce pollution worldwide:
Shanghai, 3dman_eu, Pixabay
Now efforts to dial back air pollution worldwide are likely to take a hit: On Tuesday, less than a week after rolling back fuel-economy standards for the auto industry, President Trump announced an executive order reversing the rest of the Obama administration’s climate plan. If carried through, the order — which lifts American limits on carbon dioxide emissions from coal-fired power plants, the largest contributor of particulate pollution…
Carbon dioxide and particulates are both released from coal-fired power plants and not from solar, wind, and hydropower. Power plants fired by natural gas power don’t emit particulates and release far less carbon dioxide than burning coal (though studies show some methane is released by leaks in natural gas drilling and transportation).
Technologies that reduce CO2 emissions from burning coal are different and more expensive than technologies that reduce particulate emissions. People are suffering and dying now from particulate emissions from coal in Beijing and around China, but not suffering or dying from CO2 emissions.
…in 2013 the city’s administration swore to stop using coal in the large power-plants that supply electricity to the capital and its 21 million inhabitants. By 2015, three of its four coal-fired power plants had been shut down and have switched to natural gas. On Saturday (Mar. 18), the Huaneng Beijing Thermal Power Plant, which produced 845 MW of power—more than a tenth of the power created by all power plants near Beijing—was closed down, too. Its transition to burning natural gas will start soon.
But the city’s hunger for power means it’s unlikely to run on coal-free energy any time soon, or that regular blue-skies will become a reality. Beijing still gets a chunk of its power from neighboring provinces such as Hebei and Inner Mongolia, where huge coal-power plants are in operation.
The Quartz article reports that coal is “dirty” power:
Coal is the dirtiest of fossil fuels. Per kilogram, it produces the least amount of energy and the most amount of pollution (as carbon dioxide, particulate matter, nitrogen oxides, and sulfur oxides). And China consumes a lot of it.
But while particulate, nitrogen oxides (NOx) and sulfur oxides (SOx) are pollutants, carbon dioxide (CO2) is not a pollutant. CO2 contributes to global warming. Burning coal and other fossil fuels adds CO2 to the atmosphere, which is now .0004 CO2 (.04 percent):
The Earth’s atmosphere is 78 percent nitrogen, 21 percent oxygen and 1 percent other gases, including about 0.04 percent carbon dioxide.
Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has risen from .00028 (.028) at the beginning of the industrial revolution due mostly to burning of fossil fuels in developing and developed countries. Particulate pollution from coal burning in China today causes health problems similar to pollution from the “dark satanic mills” during England’s Industrial Revolution, that William Blake wrote of.
Over a century later, pollution from coal was still killing across the United Kingdom. The Great Smog of 1952, also called the Big Smoke killed some 4,000 people, and is discussed in “Everything to Know About the Great Smog of 1952, as Seen on The Crown,” (Time, November 4, 2016)
The Big Smoke developed in London on Dec. 5, 1952, triggered by a period of cold weather collecting airborne pollutants, mainly from the coal fires that were used to heat homes at the time, which formed a thick layer of smog over the city. According to the United Kingdom’s public weather service, it was so thick you couldn’t see from one side of the street to the other. In one East London area, it was reported to be so thick people could not see their feet.
A team of atmospheric scientists researching pollution in China say they’ve cracked a 60-year-old mystery — with research that explains not only the haze over Beijing, but also the remarkably toxic Great Smog of London from 1952.
By examining conditions in China and experimenting in a lab, the scientists suggest that a combination of weather patterns and chemistry could have caused London’s fog to turn into a haze of concentrated sulfuric acid.
The article describes the research in more detail, and concludes:
“London fog only had to do with coal burning — it is relatively easy to solve the problem,” Zhang says. “In Beijing or any other cities in China, you have coal burning, traffic emissions, agriculture. It’s very complicated … it’s very, very difficult [to solve].”
Chinese government policies that try to reduce CO2 emissions from burning coal rather than reducing particulate emissions, raise electricity costs, which results in more Chinese people burning coal at home instead of drawing electricity from the grid.
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Nicholas Lardy’s 
gues that one-third of the world’s population lacks access to the rule of law, and elites of the world tend not to be bothered by that. The video looks at the informals of Tanzania as well as Peru.
The Uganda model is discussed in this post: “
Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has risen from .00028 (.028) at the beginning of the industrial revolution due mostly to burning of fossil fuels in developing and developed countries. Particulate pollution from coal burning in China today causes health problems similar to pollution from the