The Madness That Is The Green New Deal - Burning Coal To Clear The Air

All over America, the provisions of Biden’s Green New Deal, aka the Inflation Reduction Act, remain in place. You can see the impact in rural America, where massive amounts of productive farmland are being covered in solar panels to provide the “clean” energy that we need to save the planet from the existential threat of “global warming”.

The solar panels used in these “farms” are almost all made in China. Even those that are made outside of China rely on components that come from China. One of the key elements of these panels is something called polysilicon.

Polysilicon is an extremely high-purity form of the element silicon (Si). The manufacture of polysilicon is a high energy process. The energy to produce polysilicon in China comes in virtually all cases from the burning of coal.

Yes. In order to make the “green” solar panels to cover our farmland to “save the planet,” the Chinese are burning coal at an unprecedented rate. In fact, to keep up with demand for the “green” solar panels, the Chinese are building vast numbers of new coal plants.

That “resurgence” in the construction of new coal-fired power plants in China is “undermining the country’s clean-energy progress”, says a joint report by the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA) and Global Energy Monitor (GEM). The country began building 94.5 gigawatts (GW) of new coal-power capacity and resumed 3.3GW of suspended projects in 2024, the highest level of construction in the past 10 years, according to the two thinktanks.

Coal is not declining as an energy source in China. It is and will remain the main source of electricity for the foreseeable future. As new plants are being brought online, the Chinese are also delaying shutting down old plants.

Not surprisingly, therefore, China’s coal consumption is growing rapidly. This is not because of delays in adopting “green” technology. It is because the Chinese are aggressively moving to embrace the manufacture of things like solar panels. The increase in coal consumption is a direct result of the increase in the production of so-called green technologies like solar panels.

The Chinese are burning more coal “to save the planet” from fossil fuels. Wrap your head around that.

The scale of China’s coal consumption is mind-boggling. China consumes half the world’s coal. Global operating coal capacity grew by 2% in 2023, with China driving two-thirds of new additions, and a small uptick was seen for the first time since 2019 in the rest of the world, according to Global Energy Monitor's annual survey of the global coal fleet.

The consequences are clear. Chinese cities are often blanketed in thick smog. Visibility can be less than fifty meters.

• China consumes over half of the world's coal and contributes more than 20% of global CO2 emissions from coal combustion.

• In 2023, China's total emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) from coal-fired power generation reached 5.56 billion metric tons, an all-time high. China's coal-fired power emissions accounted for a record 64.4% of total global coal emissions in 2023.

• Coal burning is a major source of air pollution in China, leading to a serious air pollution crisis. It's estimated that air pollution in China causes 1.1 million deaths annually.

• Coal use contributes to high levels of sulfur dioxide (SO2), nitrogen oxides (NOx), carbon monoxide (CO), and particulate matter (PM2.5) in the air.

If there is a better example of the hypocrisy at the heart of the “climate crisis” hoax, I don’t know what it is. We are incentivizing the Chinese to dig up and burn one of the dirtiest energy sources we use in order to manufacture solar panels that produce very small amounts of high-priced energy, so we can pretend that we are saving the planet from a threat which may or may not even exist.

Meanwhile, we are waging war on the natural gas industry and ignoring all physical evidence regarding the consequences. The increased use of natural gas in the United States has had a significant positive impact on the air. It has also meant jobs right here at home and energy independence.

None of that apparently matters. We continue to march ahead pursuing the mad policy of burning more and more coal - to clear the air.