China’s top coal firms lean into power as mining profits slip
Mining costs are rising because of aging deposits that demand deeper bores and increased maintenance to avoid accidents.
As of Monday, Poland will be host to two climate change summits: One organized by the United Nations and the other by the World Coal Association.
The two-day International Coal and Climate Summit in Warsaw is looking to improve coal’s reputation by focusing on clean coal technology.
The summit will feature some of the world’s largest coal companies, senior policy-makers, business leaders, academics and NGO representatives, gathered to discuss the role of coal in the global economy, in the context of the climate change agenda.
Poland’s Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Economy, Janusz Piechociński will open the event at the Ministry of Economy.
Meanwhile, UN climate talks will head into their second and final week in the country.
Environmentalist see this double-booking as a distraction from climate change discussions.
In an open letter to Christiana Figueres, Executive Secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, Greenpeace wrote:
“It is outrageous that the World Coal Summit… will take place at the beginning of the second week of the climate negotiations… We would not like events promoting the most polluting of industries to become associated with solving climate change. While we recognize that the focus of the Coal and Climate Summit is so-called “clean coal”, in our view this ranks among the most desperate of myths spun by the coal industry in a frantic bid to survive.”
Figueres responded, telling Reuters that she would “speak to the coal industry to show them that they can and must immediately deploy policies and technologies to lower their industry’s carbon footprint more swiftly and urgently.”
The involvement of Poland’s politicians in the World Coal Association summit is not surprising. The country was the world’s 10th biggest producer of electricity from coal and peat in 2011, AFP reports. In 2012 Poland was the world’s ninth-biggest coal producer.
4 Comments
UNillogic
Laughable mythology of global warming repackaged as climate change,
Can and Must UN policies once again paraded as self-evident truth,
carbon is pollution??
Luv
Thank goodness the NIPCC report last month finally shut the door on the “global warming” — oops, I mean “climate change” — oops, I mean Carbon Tax fraud. So these people can all resign from their present positions, shut down their departments and get a real job!
Bron
UNilogic/Luv – are you for real? Don’t you read and think and draw your own conclusions? Just look at the night view of the earth from space and ask yourself where is all this energy needed to illuminate the earth at night is coming from and if it really does not have any effect on the climate. Some years ago people believed that the fish stocks in the oceans are inexhaustible. Now many of them are on the brink of collapse at 10% of what was before. There is similarity here.
tofurkey
Christina Figueres is a Costa Rican, fortunate to come from such a beautiful country. That country is in a position where a large part of their ecomony comes from tourism. Many would argue that is not a sustainable economic model given that the country artificially offloads many environmental costs of producing goods elsewhere and just operates as a selling finished products to the tourists. They have many other problems too, such as lack of a bottle recycle program (garbage everywhere), and poor fishing regulations. Watch the movie ‘Sharkwater’ to see the shame of Costa Rica. Those are more practical problems which have a greater urgency to be solved than arguments about global warming/climate change.