Coal dependency seen braking China's climate drive - Reuters

Source: Reuters

Coal dependency seen braking China's climate drive
Wed Aug 22, 2007 7:27AM EDT

By Alister Doyle, Environment Correspondent

NY ALESUND, Norway (Reuters) - China will have trouble cutting
its dependence on coal despite growing pressures to fight
global warming, a leading Chinese official told an international
panel of experts on Wednesday on an Arctic island.

Amid growing concern over the climate change impact, China
will overtake the United States by 2008 as the world's leading
emitter of greenhouse gases because of booming economic
growth and a heavy reliance on high-polluting coal-fired power
plants.

"China is one of the few countries whose energy mix is dominated
by coal," Yue Ruisheng, a deputy director general at China's
State Environmental Protection Administration, told a conference
held within sight of a melting Arctic glacier.

Coal makes up almost 70 percent of primary energy use in China
against a world average of below 30 percent, he told 40 experts
from 13 nations at the seminar on a Norwegian island. Coal-fired
plants are opening at a rate of about one a week.

-snip-

Read more: http://www.reuters.com/article/environmentNews/idUSL2283257620070822

Other than, of course, driving the climate over the edge of the Black Canyon of the Gunnison, metaphorically speaking.

if we don't watch out.

Some of the biggest IPOs last year were Chinese solar companies.

and there's this:
http://www.ecogeek.org/content/view/689/
Rizhao is not the most well known city in China, but it is rising in fame as a promising example of citywide solar energy use. With a name that means "City of Sunshine," they have sure lived up to it - 99% of central district houses are using solar water heaters, as well as more than 30% of suburban and village houses in the surrounding area. This amounts to 500,000 square meters of solar water heaters, doing the work of half a megawatt of electricity. The trend extends to 6,000 houses using solar cooking facilities and 60,000 greenhouses heated using solar heat collectors. In addition, a majority of city lights and traffic signals use photovoltaics.
This is not some futuristic city on the rise; Rizhao is just "a small, ordinary Chinese city with per capita incomes even lower than in most other cities in the region." Credit for solar energy's popularity goes to the government, which has undertaken a tremendous campaign for the use of these technologies. Instead of subsidizing the use of solar heaters (which they could not afford in any case), they invested in research and development to lower the cost of the appliances, putting them at price parity with their electric counterparts. At the cheaper price, the use of solar water heaters becomes a no-brainer, saving the average household $120 a year. In addition, the city now mandates solar heating installations be incorporated into all new buildings.

so, they may kick our ass with climate change AND
destroy our budding green power industry.

Great.

But it shows that the term "climate" has gone mainstream and has adopted a "usage" as describing a campaign.