The Economist reports:
Dirty coal will remain China’s most important fuel for the foreseeable future (hopes of a shale-gas revolution may be constrained by water shortages). Coal is cheaper and, as Nat Bullard of Bloomberg New Energy Finance, a firm of market analysts, points out, it provides “baseload power”—continuous energy unaffected by a lack of sun or wind.
If “dirty” coal means production of CO2, then this is nonsense. If it refers to ash, soot, sulphurs and stuff like that, well, the technology exists to mitigate these effects pretty thoroughly.
Humans produce real pollution through all of our activities. The activities required for what we now consider a decent standard of living, with clean clothing and good oral hygiene and fresh vegetables year round, produce more pollution. That’s how it is. We can mitigate pollution effectively and sustain a decent standard of living.
China as a society, as an economy, should use the resources they have to their greatest effect. If that’s coal, that’s coal. There is no moral failure in using what they have to improve their standard of living.
There’s a moral failure in stifling their people with a command economy, religious oppression, and all that kind of thing, but that’s a different topic.