Goodbye Glasgow: China ramps coal production up to record high, makes promises
As international movers and shakers reached the anticlimactic finale of their COP26 climate change hobnob in Glasgow, Scotland, China announced that its daily coal production has broken historical records.
The People Republic of China’s National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) reported that national coal production reached a record high of 12.05 million tons on November 10.
The November 11 report said that the figure represented an increase of 120,000 tons per day on the previous peak production level.
“Coal production in Shanxi, Shaanxi, Xinjiang, and other provinces have all reached new highs, laying a firm foundation for ensuring the country’s energy supply and price stabilization,” the NDRC said.
The increase in national coal production has improved market supply and coal storage at power plants that had previously seen unprecedented shortages that caused shutdowns in factory production and rolling blackouts in both industrial and residential areas in recent months.
Just last month, power stations in various provinces of China had coal storage levels that could last just 11 days. According to yesterday’s NDRC report, supplies at power plants can be assured up to 21 days.
While world leaders, conspicuously minus Xi Jinping, gathered to listen to the prognostications about global warming by climate experts in Glasgow, China faced the onset of an early winter.
On November 9, the depth of snow in Southern Mongolia broke a 70-year record, and yesterday, snowfall in Shenyang, the capital city of Liaoning Province reached 51 centimeters, the highest recorded snowfall since 1905, said state media outlet Xinhua.
Today, November 12, corporate media outlets around the world are hailing an “unexpected” US-China joint pledge to boost climate cooperation as an outcome of the COP26 meeting in Glasgow.
“While the latest pledge is short on detail, analysts say it is a tacit acknowledgement by China that the crisis warrants urgent attention and that it will play a bigger role in confronting the global challenge,” The BBC reported.
While US President Joe Biden actually showed up for the conference, he did nothing to assure the public, nor members of the British royal family, that he had any intention of actually reducing emissions either.
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