China says it will not approve any new coal mines for the next three years.

The country’s National Energy Administration (NEA) says more than 1,000 existing mines will also be closed over the coming year, reducing total coal production by 70 million tonnes.

And speaking in Shanxi today, Premier Li Keqiang stated that the coal-rich province should prepare to diversify its economy away from coal.

It “should treasure its two valuable ‘mines’ of abundant coal resources and the Jin merchants’ spirit”, he said, in order to “transform Shanxi into a region less dependent on natural resources and more on human resources.”

Analysts say this is the first time Beijing has put a ban on the opening of new mines: the move has been prompted both by falling demand for coal as a result of a slowing economy and by increasing public concern about hazardous levels of pollution, which have blanketed many cities across the country over recent months.

Beijing, a city of nearly 20 million, issued two red smog alerts – the most serious air pollution warning – in December, causing schools to close and prompting a warning to residents to stay indoors. A 2015 study estimated that air pollution – much of it from the widespread burning of coal – contributed to up to 1.6 million deaths each year in China. 

Coal’s share falling

The country is by far the world’s largest producer and consumer of coal, the most polluting fossil fuel. Emissions from coal-fired power plants and other industrial concerns in China have made it the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases, putting more climate-changing gases into the atmosphere each year than the US and the European Union combined. 

In accordance with an agreement reached with the US in late 2014, and in line with pledges made at the recent Paris summit on climate change, China aims to radically cut back on coal use in future.

But it’s not just the climate: another factor driving the reduction in coal burn is that China is under strong domestic political pressure to reduce the pollution in Beijing and other industrial cities that are blighted by heavy coal smog from factories and power stations.

In 2010, coal generated about 70% of China’s total energy: last year that figure dropped to 64% as more large-scale investments in renewable energy sources came on stream. And there are good reasons to believe the fall in China’s coal burn will continue.

China’s coal consumption already fell by 2.9% in 2014, according to official Chinese energy data released last February, taking many energy analysts by surprise. But in fact the data confirmed earlier projections of a fall in coal use, based on the country’s global records for wind and solar installations and increases in both economy-wide and power plant efficiency.

There is no guarantee that China’s coal burn will continue to fall year by year, however it is widely agreed that it is likely to peak by 2020 – and it may already have done so.

Uranium risk

There are also questions about whether the coal-mining regions of China – predominantly in the north of the country – will ever recover from the  environmental devastation inflicted on them.

Vast swathes of land in Shanxi province, once the main coal production area, have been destroyed by mining: air and water pollution has caused a health crisis in many regions. 

The province of Inner Mongolia – bigger than France and Spain combined – is now the main area for coal, accounting for about 25% of China’s total production, most of it through open-cast mining. Copper, lead and uranium are also mined in the province.

Indigenous groups of nomadic herders say their lands are being destroyed and water sources poisoned by mining, with ponds full of toxins littering the countryside.  

Concerns have also been raised about vast uranium deposits found near coal-mining areas. China’s fast-growing nuclear industry has complained that vital uranium deposits might be contaminated by coal mining.

But others fear that uranium-contaminated coal could be being burned in power stations, showering radioactive dust on the surrounding countryside and its inhabitants.

Kieran Cooke writes for Climate News Network.

Additional reporting by The Ecologist.

Africa’s natural environments and spectacular wildlife are about to face their biggest challenge ever.

In a paper published late last year in Current Biology, my colleagues and I assess the dramatic environmental changes that will be driven by an infrastructure-expansion scheme so sweeping in scope, it is dwarfing anything the Earth’s biggest continent has ever been forced to endure.

Africa’s population is exploding – expected nearly to quadruple this century, according to the United Nations. With that, comes an escalating need to improve food production and food security.

In addition, Africa today is experiencing a frenzy of mining activity, with most of the investment coming from overseas. China, for instance, is investing over US$100 billion annually, with India, Brazil, Canada and Australia also being big foreign investors.

To feed its growing population and move its minerals to shipping ports for export, Africa needs better roads and railroads. When located in the right places, improved transportation can do a lot of good.

It makes it easier for farmers to get access to fertiliser and new farming technologies, and cheaper to get crops to urban markets with less spoilage. It can also encourage rural investment while improving livelihoods, access to health services, and education for local residents.

Opening Pandora’s box

Improved transportation is especially important for Africa’s agriculture, which is badly under-performing. In many areas, large ‘yield gaps’ exist between what could be produced under ideal conditions and what is actually being produced. With better farming, Africa’s yields could be doubled or even tripled without clearing one more hectare of land.

However, there is another side to new transportation projects -; a dark side, especially for the environment. When located in areas with high environmental values, new roads or railroads can open a Pandora’s box of problems.

Roads slicing into remote areas can lead to range of legal and illegal human land uses. For instance, in the Amazon, 95% of all deforestation occurs within five kilometres of a road; and for every kilometre of legal road there are three kilometres of illegal roads. In the Congo Basin, forest elephants decline sharply, and signs of hunters and poachers increase, up to 50 kilometres from roads.

In the wrong places, roads can facilitate invasions of natural areas by illegal miners, colonists, loggers and land speculators. In my view, the explosive expansion of roads today is probably the greatest single peril to the world’s natural environments and wildlife.

Earlier studies that my colleagues and I conducted, including a major study published in Nature last year, suggest Africa is likely to be a global epicentre of environmental conflict. A key reason: an unprecedented scheme to dramatically expand African roads, railroads and energy infrastructure.

Africa’s 33 ‘development corridors’

In total, we have identified 33 massive ‘development corridors’ that are being proposed or are underway. At the heart of each corridor is a road or railroad, sometimes accompanied by a pipeline or power line.

The projects have a variety of proponents, including the African Development Bank, national governments, international donors and lenders, and commercial agricultural and mining interests. They’re intended to promote large-scale development and their scope is breathtaking.

If completed in their entirety, the corridors will total over 53,000 kilometres in length, crisscrossing the African continent. Some individual corridors are over 4,000 kilometres long.

Will these corridors generate key social and economic benefits, or will they cause great environmental harm? To address this question, we looked at three factors, focusing on a 50-kilometre-wide band laid over the top of each corridor.

First, we assessed the ‘natural values’ of each corridor, by combining data on its biodiversity, endangered species, critical habitats for wildlife, and the carbon storage and climate-regulating benefits of its native vegetation.

Second, we mapped human populations near each corridor, using satellite data to detect nightlights from human settlements (to avoid lands that were simply being burned, we included only places with ‘persistent’ nightlights). We then combined the natural-value and population data to generate a conservation-value score for each corridor, reasoning that sparsely populated areas with high natural values have the greatest overall conservation value.

Finally, we estimated the potential for new roads or railroads to increase food production. Areas that scored highly had soils and climates suitable for farming but large yield gaps, were within several hours’ drive of a city or port, and were projected to see large future increases in food demand.

Costs versus benefits

When we compared the conservation value of each corridor with its potential agricultural benefits, we found huge variation among the corridors.

A half dozen of the corridors look like a really good idea, with large benefits and limited environmental costs. However, another half dozen seem like a really bad idea, in that they’d damage critical environments, especially rainforests of the Congo Basin and West Africa and biologically rich equatorial savanna regions.

Video: A two-minute video summary of our study’s main findings.

In the middle, there are 20 or so corridors that appear ‘marginal’. These tend to have high environmental values and high potential agricultural benefits, or vice versa.

We argue that these marginal projects should be evaluated in detail, on a case-by-case basis. If they do proceed, it should only happen under the most stringent conditions, with careful environmental assessment and land-use planning, and with specific measures in place (such as new protected areas) to limit or mitigate their impacts.

Dangers for Africa

There’s no such thing as a free ride. For Africa, the dangers of the development corridors are profound. Even if well executed, we estimate that the current avalanche of corridors would slice through over 400 protected areas and could easily degrade another 2,000 or so. This bodes poorly for Africa’s wildlife and biodiversity generally.

Beyond this, the corridors will encourage human migration into many sparsely populated areas with high environmental values. The wild card in all this is the hundreds of billions of dollars of foreign investments pouring into Africa each year for mining. Even if a corridor is likely to yield only modest benefits for food production, it may be very difficult for governments and decision makers to say no to big mining investors.

The bottom line: it could be a fraught battle to stop even ill-advised development corridors, though not impossible. If we shine a bright light on the corridors and argue strongly that those with limited benefits and large costs are a bad idea, we may succeed in stopping or at least delaying some of the worst of them.

This is unquestionably a vital endeavour. Africa is changing faster than any continent has ever changed in human history, and it is facing unprecedented socioeconomic and environmental challenges.

The next few decades will be crucial. We could promote relatively sustainable and equitable development – or end up with an impoverished continent whose iconic natural values and wildlife have been irretrievably lost. 

Bill Laurance is Distinguished Research Professor and Australian Laureate, James Cook University.

Also on The Ecologist: ‘Roads to ruin: the G20’s ecocidal infrastructure rampage‘ by Bill Laurance.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Commentators eager to arrest the move towards renewable energy are facing increasing difficulties finding arguments for the continued use of fossil fuel.

The latest attempt to justify the use of carbon fuels is that ‘otherwise people in poorer countries will never get electricity’. Coal is vital, they say, for the alleviation of the conditions of life in less developed countries.

I have recently finished a draft of a book chapter on the growth of solar around the world. The very unpolished extract below is largely based on an exceptional piece of work by KPMG India on the likely evolution of the costs of solar versus coal in that country.

I think their conclusion – essentially that solar is already competitive with coal even after including distribution charges and grid integration costs, and will become much cheaper in future – is an effective response to the ‘coal alleviates poverty’ meme. 

Governments are increasingly using open auctions as the means by which they attract developers into building solar farms. Each participant offers an electricity price, expressed in cents per kilowatt hour, for power from individual locations. The past year (2015) has seen a sharp decline in the prices bid into these auctions everywhere around the world.

India: solar PV bids already under 5p / 7¢

India is a good example as it begins its drive to get electricity to all its huge population. In 2014 developers offered to build solar farms for payments of an average of about 7 rupees per kilowatt hour. That’s around 10 US ¢, or 7 UK pence at current exchange rates. Three state auctions in the third quarter of 2015 in Madhya Pradesh, Telangana and Punjab saw offers of just over 5 rupees (5p / 7.5¢).

The Indian press openly speculated that these offers were too low to be profitable for their developers. But in November 2015 another round of tenders in Andhra Pradesh in south east India resulted in a low bid of 4.63 rupees (about 4.6p / 7¢ per kilowatt hour).

This was for sites totalling 500 MW and was won by the US company SunEdison, the world’s largest renewable energy developer.  It currently claims to be installing 4 gigawatts of capacity a year around the world. In the face of this evidence of expertise from the bidder, this time the scepticism about the viability of the price was more muted.

Just before the Andhra Pradesh auction was completed, accountants India KPMG released a detailed report on the state of PV in their country. “We see solar power becoming a mainstay of our energy landscape in the next decade”, they wrote.

As we all tend to be, they were still cautious about future solar PV bids. KPMG’S best guess for auction prices was 4.20 rupees per kilowatt hour (about 4.2p / 6.3¢) by 2020, only about 10% more than the SunEdison November 2015 bid. 

Now it’s cheaper than coal

What matters most in India is how well these numbers compare to electricity from inexpensive locally-mined coal. KPMG says that the current cost of power from this source is about 4.46 rupees (4.5p / 6.7¢) per kilowatt hour, about 4% below the November 2015 record low bid in Andhya Pradesh.

But in a power station using some imported coal, the accountants calculate, the cost would be higher than solar. In India, PV is now directly competitive with some coal power stations and by 2020 it will be 10% cheaper, KPMG conclude. They predict that the raw cost of solar electricity from big solar farms will be 3.5 to 3.7 rupees by 2025. (Around 3.6p / 5.5¢). If history is any guide, they are being pessimistic.

2014 bids
All ~7

Q3 2015
Punjab – 5.09
Telagana – 5.17
Madhya Pradesh – 5.05

November 2015
Andhra Pradesh – 4.63

For comparison
Electricity from Local coal – 4.46
Electricity at coastal coal plants using imported coal – INR 4.76

All figures are Indian rupees per kilowatt hour.

Low grid costs for local power use

These numbers are not complete. We also need to include the cost of getting the electricity to the final consumer. In many countries this penalises solar but not so in India, says KPMG. Many of the coal plants are hundreds of kilometres away from the centres of electricity demand so the relative attractiveness of solar is improved when electricity distribution costs (‘network charges’) are fully included.

In fact when the accountants have fully loaded the network and other costs PV ends up as very slightly cheaper than using lndian-mined coal. And, of course, this advantage will grow as solar gets cheaper.

You are entitled to respond by saying that PV only produces electricity, even in the sunniest parts of India for an average of 12 hours a day. When people want light to read, cook or study, it isn’t available. (Solving this problem is what much of the rest of the book is about).

But what we may not have known is that almost 20% of all Indian electricity demand at the moment is used for pumping water for irrigation. This can easily be carried out solely in the daytime.

At the moment PV only provides a tiny fraction of Indian electricity. But it will grow rapidly with strong backing from the Modi government and from the favourable underlying economics. As in other countries around the world, it will then start to become increasingly costly to run the grid to cope with the unpredictability and diurnal variability of solar power.

More PV means more batteries to help stabilise the voltage of the grid, for example, in the event of unexpectedly high or low sunshine.

And, very sensibly, KPMG also includes a cost for the financial impact of coal fired power plants working fewer and fewer hours as solar soars. This is a real financial burden because running the fixed costs of these power stations will be spread across a smaller electricity output.

By 2025, what are the impacts of these charges, usually known as ‘grid integration’ costs, once PV has become a really significant portion of all electricity production? KPMG thinks the figure for India will be about 1.2 rupees (1.2p / 1.8¢) per kilowatt hour.

This is roughly in line with estimates for other countries. Even after including this figure, PV is still cheaper than coal in 2025 and then provides 12.5% of all Indian electricity from about 166 GW of installed capacity.

An unstoppable momentum

Most of the KPMG work is focused on the finances of building ground-mounted solar farms for large-scale production. But it also looks at two specific applications: driving agricultural pumping operations (a task often performed by highly polluting diesel generating sets at the moment) and, second, what the accountants call the ‘Solar House’. What do they mean by this?

“The concept of the ‘Solar House’ refers to the condition when the entire power needs of a household can be met by rooftop and on-site solar panels, which combined with energy storage, can potentially make the household completely independent of the grid. This can happen when technology will bring the cost of solar power and storage systems to below the cost of power delivered by the grid. This event has the potential to change the dynamics of the power utility-customer relationship(s) forever.”

They go on to get really excited about Solar Houses. When have you ever seen accountants write like this before?

“The achievement of the ‘Solar House’ is expected to be a landmark in mankind’s efforts to access energy. The ‘Solar House’ will help India leapfrog technologies in the area of supplying uninterrupted 24×7 energy to its citizens. When the conditions for the ‘Solar House’ are achieved, (it) can override all barriers.”

KPMG expects 20% of Indian houses to have PV by 2024/25. The authors make the point that once residential batteries have come down in price sufficiently, householders have a clear and unambiguous reason to switch to solar. It will be cheaper than being connected to what may be an unreliable and possibly expensive grid.

And, as we may be seeing in other countries already, once households drift away from being connected, or even if they simply use far less electricity because of the PV on their roofs, the costs of the distribution network need to be spread ever more thickly on those that remain. That further increases the incentive on those people remaining on the grid to switch to PV.’

Chris Goodall is an expert on energy, environment and climate change, and a frequent contributor to The Ecologist. He blogs at Carbon Commentary. His next book, ‘The Switch’, is due for publication in 2016.

This article was first published on Carbon Commentary. It is an extract from The Switch, a book about the global transition to solar power, to be published in June 2016 by Profile Books.

Simple arithmetic tells us that a few tweaks in farming could make a huge difference to Britain’s ability to cope with flood – and with the droughts we could be facing in a few months’ time.

Thus, the catchment area that picks up the rain is likely to be at least a thousand times larger than the area on which all that water is finally dumped.

So one inch of rain on the surrounding hills becomes 1,000 inches – more than 80 feet – in the river, or in the High Street if the river can’t cope.

Catastrophes are rare only because the rain doesn’t fall all at once, and by the time the last drop has fallen the water that fell first has already been safely drained away. So the total amount is obviously important – six inches of rain over the catchment is harder to cope with than one inch.

But timing matters just as much: how quickly, or slowly, the water flows from the hills to the drains to the river and so to the sea. If the water that falls on the hills takes a day to drain away, as opposed to one hour – or a week rather than a day – then the rivers would probably cope.

Much of the catchment that funnels the water into the rivers is likely to be farmland – and farmers can do a very great deal to stem the flow, and to buy time. In fact they, rather than civil engineers (or the inexhaustible sand-bags that David Cameron has offered, or the emergency services and the army whom he has cause to praise so fulsomely) could almost certainly make the greatest contribution of all. By far.

They can do this in four main ways:

1. Planting

Deep-rooting perennial plants in general hold more water for longer than annuals, so here is another good reason to follow the lead of Britain’s Pasture-Fed Livestock Association and raise animals on home-grown pasture rather than on home-grown cereal or (still less!) on imported cereal and soya.

PFLA members are showing that this can be done – cattle and sheep on 100% pasture, and pigs and poultry on more than is generally supposed. The best water-catchers of all, though, are trees.

Once (and in some countries, still) it was standard practice to plant trees at the tops of hills to stem the flow of water from the top and to prevent erosion. Trees stop at least some of the rain from reaching the ground at all: they catch it on their leaves and some of it then evaporates away. The rain that does reach the ground is in part transpired away. In any case, they certainly slow the run-off.

Trees (and hedgerows) are even more helpful when planted in rows or in narrow copses along the contours. Ideally they should then be integrated into the farming system as a whole to become a true exercize in agroforestry. This all seems obvious. But while much of the world including the EU has been promoting agroforestry, Defra has not.

2. Cultivation: ground-cover and contours

It helps, too, a lot, if fields are never left bare, and if the land is ploughed at all it should be around the contours rather than up and down (see photo, right).

I seem to remember learning that in O-level geography. The rationale is that countour-ploughing holds rainfall in the furrows where it can infiltrate down into the subsoil without eroding the field – in all but the heaviest of rainfall.

Up and down ploughing achieves the precise reverse: when it rains rivulets of water cascade down the slope along the furrows, carrying soil, seed and nutrients to the bottom of the hill.

But in much of Britain, up and down ploughing is the norm – for the simple reason that it’s harder to do it that way, never mind the tens or hundreds of tonnes of topsoil that may be washed away.

3. Topography

Chinese and South East Asian farmers hold millions of tonnes of monsoon rain on hillsides and mountain sides by terracing – paddy fields in the sky.

We don’t grow rice in Britain but the principle can still be applied. Swales (barriers) can be made along the contours with straw-bales or logs or stones covered in earth. It may be possible to create ponds, sometimes permanent ponds, on the upward side – good for wildlife, and a reserve against future drought.

4. Soil structure

Last but certainly not least, the soil can be made more spongy, able to hold far more water, just by increasing the organic content – which of course has many other advantages too. Plants find it easier to establish their roots and extend root systems in well structured soils. And the soils will be richer in nutrients and invertebrate life from earthworms to soil fungi.

No more business as usual! No more governance as usual!

So should we blame the farmers for the floods? Occasionally, perhaps, but in general, absolutely not. Like all working people they are hard-pressed to make a living and often cannot afford the kinds of changes that are needed. It costs a lot to introduce significant agroforestry, and to convert to organic. If farms are to do what needs doing, society as a whole must bear at least some of the cost.

Here indeed is yet another instance where governments are required to govern: to do what obviously needs doing on behalf of the society they were elected to serve, and on behalf of humanity and the biosphere as a whole.

But the general strategy of all British governments of all parties since about 1980 has been to leave the country’s affairs to the market which means that power is ceded to the corporates, especially the transnationals, who play the market most adroitly; and to the banks, who lend the money (or, to be accurate, have been given the right to deem that the money has been lent, and to demand pay-back with interest).

Government strategy in agriculture as in all things has been to offer the corporates and banks the opportunity to fill their boots. Corporates have little or nothing to gain from agroforestry or organic farming, but big engineering companies can make a killing by building dams and ramparts. So if anything at all is done, that is what will be done.

To control floods we need a different approach to farming. Sir John Beddington in his Foresight report of 2011 on The Future of Food and Farming said “we cannot continue with business as usual.”

Even more to the point, we cannot continue with governance as usual. Truly the world’s affairs need re-thinking from first principles.

Colin Tudge is (with Ruth West and Graham Harvey) a co-founder of the Oxford Real Farming Conference and writes at the Campaign for Real Farming. He will be speaking at the 2016 Oxford Real Farming Conference next week.

The 2016 Oxford Real Farming Conference will be held in Oxford Town Hall on 6th & 7th January. View the programme, get a flavour of the event from previous years by watching the film (in embed, above), or exploring past conferences. Book your tickets for either of both days here.

Twitter: @OFRC

In Paris, in early December, the advocates of nuclear power made yet another appeal to world leaders to adopt their technology as central to saving the planet from dangerous climate change.

Yet analysis of the plans of 195 governments that signed up to the Paris Agreement, each with their own individual schemes on how to reduce national carbon emissions, show that nearly all of them exclude nuclear power.

Only a few big players – China, Russia, India, South Korea and the United Kingdom – still want an extensive programme of new-build reactors.

To try to understand why this is so the US-based Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists asked eight experts in the field to look at the future of nuclear power in the context of climate change.

One believed that large-scale new-build nuclear power “could and should” be used to combat climate change, and another thought nuclear could play a role, although a small one.

The rest thought new nuclear stations were too expensive, too slow to construct and had too many inherent disadvantages to compete with renewables.

Industry in distress

Amory Lovins, co-founder and chief scientist of the Rocky Mountain Institute, produced a devastating analysis saying that the slow-motion decline of the nuclear industry was simply down to the lack of a business case.

The average nuclear reactor, he wrote, was now 29 years old and the percentage of global electricity generated continued to fall from a peak of 17.6% in 1996 to 10.8% in 2014. “Financial distress stalks the industry”, he wrote.

Lovins says nuclear power now costs several times more than wind or solar energy and is so far behind in cost and building time that it could never catch up. The full details of what he and other experts said are on the Bulletin’s site, with some of their comments below.

Professor Jeff Terry, of the physics department at Illinois Institute of Technology, was the greatest enthusiast for new nuclear build: “Nuclear energy is a reliable, low carbon dioxide source of electricity that can and should be used to combat climate change.

“China, India, Russia, and South Korea are all building nuclear plants both at home and in other countries. Therefore, nuclear energy will continue to play a role in mitigating the effects of climate change for the next 80 years.

“Why are these countries turning to nuclear energy? Mainly due to the versatility and stability of nuclear generation. Nuclear power has the highest capacity factor of any low carbon dioxide-emitting power source.”

Too slow

Another potential enthusiast was Seth Grae, president and CEO of the Lightbridge Corporation, who believes light water nuclear reactors “must increase globally” if the world is to reach the goals of the Paris Agreement.

However, new technologies that could have a major impact on decarbonising global electricity generation, including advances such as grid-level electricity storage, more efficient wind turbines and new types of nuclear reactors, are not being developed fast enough, he argues.

“Unfortunately, these technologies are not economically competitive enough for utilities to deploy at a large enough scale to prevent catastrophic climate change”, Grae writes. “Sufficient improvement in economic competitiveness might not be achieved in time to prevent the worst effects of climate change.”

M.V. Ramana, of the Nuclear Futures Laboratory and the Program on Science and Global Security at Princeton University, was dismissive:

“There are still some who hope that nuclear power will magically undergo a massive expansion within a relatively short period of time. The evidence so far suggests that this is a false hope, one that is best abandoned if we are to deal with climate change with the seriousness the problem demands.”

Peter Bradford, adjunct professor at Vermont Law School, and former Nuclear Regulatory Commission member, agreed: “Climate change, so urgent and so seemingly intractable, has become the last refuge of nuclear charlatans throughout the Western world.”

He said James Hansen, perhaps the most visible of the climate scientists who advocate heavy reliance on breeder or other innovative reactor designs, did so without paying any attention to their track record of long and costly failure.

Hui Zhang, physicist and senior research associate at Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, said China had a big programme to build nuclear power stations. But they currently generated only 1% of the nation’s huge electricity needs, and even if the target of 110 power reactors by 2030 were achieved, they would produce only 5%.

“While a fleet of nuclear reactors with 130 GWe by 2030 would represent a substantial expansion (over four times China’s current capacity of 30 GWe, and more than the current US capacity of about 100 GWe), it would account for only 5% of total energy use in the country and would constitute just one quarter of the non-fossil energy needed.

“In practice, the total energy use will likely be higher than the planned cap, so the share of nuclear power in the overall energy mix would be even less.

“Eventually, nuclear power is important if China is to address concerns about air pollution and climate change, but it is only one piece of a huge puzzle.”

Paul Brown writes for Climate News Network .