Source:
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2020/12/16/asia-pacific/china-coal-climate-change/
" “It will take time, but in the future, miners will wear suits and white shirts,” says Han Weihai, manager of Huawei’s mine projects in Shanxi. “People no longer want to work in a mine, especially young people with college degrees.”
When President Xi Jinping announced in September that China would be carbon-neutral by 2060, he gave coal a four-decade transition period.
... The long transition buys China time to use up its vast coal resources and figure out how to gradually shut down an industry that still employs, directly and indirectly, tens of millions of people.
Coal’s long exit is part of a two-speed approach proposed by climate scientists at Tsinghua University. Citing the inertia of energy and economic systems, they proposed allowing coal power plants to continue being built until around 2030, when China will be richer and replacement technologies will have advanced. Then the plan calls for the ongoing transition to solar and nuclear to accelerate sharply.
... “The industry will cut jobs, but it should be slow and gradual,” says Wang Haigang, Xinyuan’s deputy general manager. His mine had 3,000 workers in 2012, and by 2025 plans to have fewer than 1,000. “It may take a long time, but we’re aiming for a future in which no workers need to work underground.”
... Chinese state-owned utilities are betting on coal’s longevity by building new coal-fired power plants, with their fleets set to expand about 10% by 2025. Just last year, China opened the $30 billion Haoji Railway line, a 2,000-kilometer (1,243-mile) conduit to haul 200 million tons of coal a year directly from central mining basins to energy-hungry regions in the southeast.
,,, China needs to stop building coal power plants immediately if it wants to meet the 2060 pledge, according to the Draworld Environment Research Center and the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air. That goal would require whittling China’s coal fleet down to 680 gigawatts by 2030, a reversal of the 1,300-gigawatt expansion currently planned.
... In China, it isn’t corporate dynasties like Koch Industries that are lobbying for fossil fuels, it’s provincial party leaders and heads of state-owned enterprises. These local figures rely on the industry to generate jobs and economic growth, and to maintain their power and personal wealth.
... When Xi began pursuing more progressive climate policies five years ago, companies began upgrading their plants to trap more of the small particulates that generate smog, and to produce more electricity from every ton of coal they burn. Chinese power companies now brag that their best coal power plants are on the same environmental level as some gas-fired units.
They are also banking on technology breakthroughs in areas such as carbon capture and sequestration, which traps and stores the greenhouse gases emitted when coal is burned, to help achieve carbon neutrality."