Industry

When it comes to coal consumption, no other nation comes close to China. The country reigns as the world’s largest coal user, burning almost half of the global total each year. About 70 percent of China’s total energy consumption and nearly 80 percent of its electricity production come from coal, and its recent shift from being a historical net coal exporter to the world’s largest net coal importer took only three years.

China’s great thirst for coal is undeniably troubling from a sustainable development standpoint. However, the situation may be changing…

On October 12, ChinaFAQs and the Environmental and Energy Study Institute (EESI) held a briefing on Capitol Hill about the issues driving China’s renewable energy, energy efficiency, and climate policies. While China and the United States differ in important respects, they have some similar challenges and opportunities relating to energy. Both face economic, employment, energy security, and environmental challenges. The United States and China both cooperate and compete with each other on clean energy initiatives and technology.

ChinaFAQs Expert and Tufts University Professor Kelly Sims Gallagher recently gave a presentation on the global diffusion of cleaner energy technologies at the University of Texas at Austin’s Energy Institute. Her presentation offers a preview of her new book on the topic, forthcoming from The MIT Press in 2013. The book identifies the conditions necessary for motivating the international diffusion of cleaner energy technologies, and empirically investigates the extent to which certain barriers and incentives to their movement across international borders are valid in the Chinese context.

The U.S. Department of Commerce on Thursday announced its preliminary decision that it will impose anti-dumping tariffs of over 31 percent on solar cells imported from China.

Commerce is currently scheduled to make its final determination in early October 2012. At that point, if Commerce makes an affirmative final determination, and the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) makes an affirmative final determination that imports of solar cells from China threaten to injure the domestic solar industry, Commerce will issue an antidumping duty order.

The idea of a total cap on energy consumption in China, first suggested last March before the National People’s Congress has reemerged in Durban, and surprisingly there are now suggestions that China might consider some kind of a cap on carbon emissions. This has been suggested apparently as part of domestic policy rather than as a negotiating position, but details are very sketchy.