TheEconomistAugust 24th 2019 251A
large signin the city hall of San Car-
los, on the island of Negros in the Phil-
ippines, lays out the local government’s
ambitions. It wants San Carlos to be “a
model green city”, “a renewable energy hub
for Asia” and “a sustainable tourism desti-
nation”. But the local officials sitting di-
rectly beneath the sign are keen to talk
about something else: why a plan to build a
coal-fired power plant nearby is an excel-
lent idea.
Coal drives Asia. Between 2006 and
2016 the continent’s consumption of it
grew by 3.1% a year. Asia now accounts for
fully 75% of global demand for the stuff
(see chart 1 on next page). China is the
world’s largest producer and consumer of
coal. Largely as a result, it also emits more
carbon dioxide than any other country. In-
dia is the second-biggest consumer. Japan
and South Korea are also big consumers,
while Australia and Indonesia are big pro-
ducers. South-East Asia was the only re-
gion in the world in which coal’s share of
power generation grew last year, according
to the International Energy Agency (iea), a
research body. And four of the five coun-
tries that shell out the most in subsidies for
the fuel are Asian.
Asia’s passion for coal, in turn, threat-
ens the health of the planet. The Paris
agreement on climate change (which every
country in Asia, from Afghanistan to NewZealand, has signed) aims to limit the in-
crease in global temperatures above pre-
industrial averages to “well below” 2°C. To
avoid 1.5°C of global warming, virtually all
of the planet’s coal-fired plants need to
close by 2050, climatologists say, given the
vast quantity of greenhouse gases pro-
duced by mining, transporting and burn-
ing coal. No new coal-fired plants should
be built from next year on, the secretary-
general of the unsays. But ubs, a Swiss
bank, reckons that Indonesia and Vietnam
may still be building coal-fired power sta-
tions in 2035. Asia’s last coal plant, it pro-
jects, will close only in 2079. Curbing glo-
bal warming depends on convincing Asian
governments to take a different path.
China accounts for about half the coal
the world consumes each year—far more
than any other country. Happily, its appe-
tite seems to be waning. Although it
burned through almost 4bn tonnes last
year, a slight increase on the year before,
that is still below the peak of 4.24bn tonnes
in 2013. Coal’s share of China’s energy mix
has fallen by about ten percentage points
over the past decade, to 59%.
This is the result of a sustained and
multifaceted official campaign to clean up
China’s energy generation. There has been
huge investment in renewables, leaving
China with a third of the world’s wind tur-Power generation
Down and dirty
SAN CARLOS
Asia digs up and burns three-quarters of the world’s coal. That must change if the
climate is not to
Asia
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