China Knows Climate Deals Are Ruinous

With more Americans out of work than we've seen in decades, and with families losing their homes, is now the time — if ever — to increase energy costs across the board? The Sierra Club thinks so. Its six-year assault on new, affordable electricity generation has successfully destroyed 100 planned or proposed coal-fired power plants in the U.S. and the thousands of good-paying jobs and billions of dollars worth of economic development they would have created. In total, the club has stopped 61 gigawatts of new, affordable electric capacity from reaching American consumers. This obstruction persists even as our electricity demand has outstripped our growth in generating capacity by 3-to-1, according to a North American Electricity Reliability Council report from last October. To keep electricity supply meeting increasing demand and continue to boost its economy and improve the quality of life of its citizens, China has been building coal-fired power plants aggressively. It's completing almost three new plants per month. By 2020, China will generate roughly the same amount of electricity from coal as the U.S. does from all sources — coal, natural gas, nuclear and hydro. At the same time, according to the International Energy Agency, China has "become the major world market for advanced coal-fired power plants with high-specification emission control systems."...IBD