Coal: Burned in China to bring us cheap goods.

A very salient point about energy use in China: While China has recently surpassed the U.S. as the world’s largest energy consumer one must not lose site of the fact that a substantial proportion of that energy consumption is in the service of manufacturing cheap goods for export to your local box store. In other words we have not only exported our labour to China, we have exported our energy consumption as well. The post below, taken from www.gregro.us, also makes the point that China’s energy use is still mostly in the form of coal. Their consumption of oil is but a fraction of the potential consumption implied by the rapid pace of China’s industrial development.

Oil in the US represents nearly 39% of total energy use from all sources. But in China, oil barely represents 19% of total energy use. Most important of all: China’s coal use is four times its oil use.

Read the full article HERE