Until the last few months, many energy experts and environmentalists had hoped that China's contribution to global warming would be limited.
Chinese state-owned enterprises have become more efficient in their energy use as they compete in an increasingly capitalist economy, and until recently official Chinese statistics had been showing a steep drop in coal production and consumption.
But new figures from Chinese government agencies confirm what energy industry executives had suspected: that coal use has actually been climbing faster in China than practically anywhere else in the world. To the extent that global warming is caused by humanity, as many scientists believe, this is a serious problem because burning coal at a power plant releases more greenhouse gases than using oil or natural gas to generate the same amount of electricity.
China's rising energy consumption complicates diplomatic efforts to limit emissions of global warming gases. The International Energy Agency in Paris predicts that the increase in greenhouse gas emissions from 2000 to 2030 in China alone will nearly equal the increase from the entire industrialized world. China is the world's second-largest emitter of such gases, after the United States.
But China's per-person energy use and greenhouse gas emissions remain far below levels found in richer countries. It has, for example, roughly one-eighth the emissions per capita as in the United States. As a developing country, China is exempt from the Kyoto Protocol, the pending international agreement to limit emissions of greenhouse gases.
When President George W. Bush rejected the Kyoto Protocol two years ago, he portrayed China's exemption as a serious flaw. The protocol has been embraced by most other large nations, however, and only requires ratification by Russia to take effect. Another developing country exempt from the Kyoto Protocol, India, is also showing strong growth in emissions as its economy prospers.
General Motors predicts that China will account for 18 percent of the world's growth in new car sales from 2002 through 2012. The United States will be responsible for another 11 percent, and India, 9 percent.
Chinese official statistics had shown a decline in coal production and consumption in the late 1990's even as the economy was growing 8 percent a year. But many Western and Chinese researchers have become suspicious of that drop over the last several years. They point out that it assumed that local governments had followed Beijing's instructions to close 47,000 small, unsafe mines producing low-grade coal and many heavily polluting small power plants. Yet researchers who visited mines and power plants found that they often remained open, with the output not being reported to Beijing because local administrators feared an outcry if they shut down important employers.
China's National Bureau of Statistics has not revised its coal figures for the late 1990's, but its latest data show that coal consumption jumped 7.6 percent last year.
A Chinese official said the bureau was likely to report a similar increase for this year. Even these figures may be low: Chinese coal industry officials have estimated that coal consumption may be rising at over 10 percent a year. China is now the world's largest coal consumer, and its power plants are burning coal faster than its aging railroads can deliver it from domestic mines, most of which are in the north. So the country is importing coal from Australia. Zhanjiang, a steamy city of 640,000, with its deepwater port, is the main receiving point in southern China. As fishermen in wooden boats brought conical wicker baskets full of silvery, sardine-sized fish ashore at dawn on a recent morning, the sun began illuminating an enormous coal-fired power plant with a big freighter from Australia tied up next to it.
The plant is only nine years old. Zhanjiang drew its electricity over high-tension lines from other cities to the north before then. But the power plant already is inadequate for the area's needs even though it is twice the size of a standard coal plant. With blackouts frequent here for lack of power, construction has just begun on another power plant, this one oil-fired. Other figures from the Bureau of Statistics have also shown very large increases in energy consumption lately. China's electrical power generation, the main use of coal in China, jumped 16 percent in the first eight months of this year, nearly four times as much as Western experts expected.
Power generation is poised to grow swiftly in the years to come, with China's output of equipment for new power plants rising by two- thirds in a single year. China has also become the world's fastest- growing importer of oil.
The Chinese are using more energy in their homes, too, as China has turned into the world's largest market for television sets and one of the largest for many other electrical appliances. A 53-year- old retired saleswoman here said that for more than half her life, her only electrical appliance at home was a light bulb. She and her husband bought a black-and-white television set in 1984, then a refrigerator in 1988. Now she has an air-conditioner, which she acquired in 1998, along with two color televisions, an electric rice cooker, a radio, the refrigerator and many lights. Only the old people do not have air-conditioning now, she said.
Environmental groups that once promoted China as a good example are now increasingly worried. If they're seeing 6 and 7 percent growth, that is obviously a concern, said Dan Lashof, a climate-change expert at the Natural Resources Defense Council.
But environmentalists are also loath to criticize China too strongly, partly because Chinese emissions per person are still so much lower than those in the developed world, and partly because China has been trying with some success to improve the energy efficiency of its industries. The central government in Beijing has had repeated difficulties in forcing provincial governments to pursue recent efficiency programs, however. China's central bank is nervous that some sectors of the economy, especially luxury housing construction, are growing too fast, and it is trying to restrain them. If it succeeds, this could temper somewhat the increase in energy use.
China is not alone in consuming a lot more energy, although its enormous population and rapid economic growth mean that its increases dwarf those of any other country in the developing world. In populous countries from Indonesia to Brazil to India, power plants are burning more and more coal and oil to meet ever- growing demand for electricity from industry and households.
Even some climate experts in developing countries are conceding that their emissions need to be addressed when international talks begin in 2005 on what will follow the Kyoto agreement, which calls for industrialized nations to reduce their emissions by 2012. Considerable reluctance persists among developing countries, however, to accept the kind of specific limits prescribed for wealthy countries by the Kyoto Protocol. There's going to be a fairly heated debate about what developing countries should do in the next round, said Rajendra Pachauri, an Indian engineer who is the chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a UN group that assesses the causes and consequences of rising temperatures.
The Chinese government is drafting a series of new economic policies, some of which will concern energy, and is expected to release them soon. Senior Chinese officials did not respond to requests for interviews over the past two months.
Two fairly senior Chinese officials said in earlier, separate interviews, after President Hu Jintao succeeded Jiang Zemin in March, that an active debate was under way over the extent to which conservation should be balanced against economic growth.