Sunday, September 25, 2011

NY Times: China and India "together are building four coal-fired power plants a week"

The Quest — By Daniel Yergin — Book Review - NYTimes.com
We now have a mountain of evidence that the 30 billion tons of carbon dioxide that humans pump into the atmosphere every year are changing the earth’s climate in ways that will have negative effects for most people.  [Can I see a written, well-argued case that a 61 degree F. world with a bit more airborne CO2 is a worse world than a 59 degree F. world with slightly less airborne CO2?]
...Coal is plentiful worldwide, and unless the new technology is much cheaper, China and India will never adopt it. And if these two countries — which together are building four coal-fired power plants a week — don’t get off coal, nothing that happens in the West matters, since the levels of carbon dioxide they will pump into the atmosphere will be well above the danger mark.

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