Worse still, Beijing demands tangible upfront geopolitical concessions by Washington in exchange for ephemeral half-promises on China’s own part-promises that have never materialized in the past.ĭomestic economic and political survival imperatives will consistently shunt aside foreigners’ hopes and aspirations for a cleaner Chinese energy system-just as they are now with Beijing’s approval of one of the biggest annual coal production increases in decades. Meanwhile, as Chinese policymakers continued allowing King Coal to undercut Queen Green, millions of metric tons per day of additional greenhouse gases would surge skyward.Ĭooperating with Beijing requires trusting in the good faith of a dictatorial regime that backslides on binding international environmental commitments and appears to be copping out on COP26’s call to accelerate the phasedown of unabated coal combustion. The disasters of the global commons can be easily blamed on the rest of the world power and economic failures at home demand responsibility, or at least scapegoats. It treats climate change as a source of leverage in its unrelenting quest to retain a monopoly on political control domestically and deference abroad. However much “green leadership” the party talks in international forums, it keeps leading the world in burning coal.
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That’s enough coal to fill a train of standard rail hopper cars that would wrap around the entire equator, plus enough left to stretch from Washington, D.C., to Los Angeles. Chinese policymakers recently greenlighted a coal mine capacity expansion of an additional 300 million metric tons in 2022-almost the annual production of the entire European Union. And the coal hopper is being loaded higher. Fear and risk aversion both favor coal entrenchment, and both are in ample supply in Beijing these days.Īs a result, millions of metric tons per day of additional greenhouse gases surge into the atmosphere. Yet in practice the country continues doubling down on coal on the back of blackouts, energy security fears, great-power competition, and Europe’s biggest land war in nearly 80 years. Naval War College’s China Maritime Studies Institute.Ĭhina is touting its renewable energy investments and has vowed to “ accelerate the pace of coal reduction” in coming years. Erickson, the research director in the U.S. Baker III Institute for Public Policy, and Andrew S. Collins, the Baker Botts fellow in energy and environmental regulatory affairs at Rice University’s James A. Green plans are secondary to political demands.īy Gabriel B. Erickson, “ China’s Energy Nationalism Means Coal Is Sticking Around,” Foreign Policy, 6 June 2022. Given the extreme volume of Gabe’s publications, I ’ll keep adding to the content below as time permits…
To help make Gabe’s insights more broadly available, I’m sharing links and excerpts from some of his publications below.
As long as America keeps producing the likes of Gabe Collins, it will have a bright future ahead indeed. After all that, nothing that involves sitting at a computer and crunching numbers could possibly faze him. To earn his sweat money at the Cactus Queen enhanced oil recovery project, Gabe sprayed and pulled weeds, moved pipe, repaired broken pumps and saltwater injection wells, loaded trash trailers, and removed the rotted carcass of a cow that had died under a tank battery-all while handling 105-degree heat, wearing a hydrogen sulfide detector, and avoiding black widow and rattlesnake bites. He was probably the only one of the 4,400 undergraduates at Princeton University when we were there (he as an undergrad, I as a grad student same Chinese classes and study with Princeton in Beijing) to help pay his tuition by working in the oilfields of Southeast New Mexico as a roustabout. Naval War College, subsequently the co-founder (with me) of our China SignPost™ 洞察中国 analytical website, and a valued research colleague ever since, Gabe Collins is one of the only professionals I know of who generates analysis of the highest caliber from a commercial, a legal, and a government perspective.Ī native of the Permian Basin, Gabe’s also gone from being the 5th-fastest boys’ 100M sprinter at the 2000 New Mexico State Track Meet ( 2nd in his school division) to being a Texas-licensed attorney and a leading water, resources, and strategic commodities expert. Once a versatile China Maritime Studies Institute (CMSI) team member with us at the U.S.
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