Read the whole piece, and understand it. Paraphrase the first two paragraphs. Choose any one paragraph and identify the words as noun, pronoun, adjective, adverb etc.
(This piece appeared in The Economist magazine. We gratefully acknowledge it.)
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Last month I was part of a gaggle of reporters who sat down with Ed Miliband, Britain’s energy secretary. He was visiting Beijing to talk to officials here about climate change. Striking an optimistic tone, he said that his Chinese counterparts had shown “a lot of interest” in Britain’s remarkable success in phasing out coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel. Britain’s last coal-fired power station closed down in September.
I was struck by this comment because China, the world’s biggest consumer of coal, is closing down very few of its coal-fired plants. In fact, it is building lots more of them, even as it installs renewable energy at a rapid pace. Last year construction started on enough coal plants to produce 100 gigawatts (GW) of power, on top of the 1,170GW of capacity already installed. That addition alone would be roughly equivalent to the total power capacity of Britain.
Shortly before Mr Miliband’s visit I had gone to Shuozhou, a nondescript city in northern China which every year churns out a whopping 200m tonnes of coal, clawed out of vast open-pit mines. Lines of trucks carry it to be washed, sorted and then burned in power stations across the country. It was snowing when I visited, but the ground was still dark with coal dust. Almost everyone I met had a job linked to the industry.
As I write in this week’s edition, places like Shuozhou are part of the reason China balks at the costs of phasing out coal. Across the country some 2.7m people are employed in mining or processing the fuel, so those jobs would be put at risk. Shutting down coal-fired power stations would come at a big cost to companies’ bottom lines, too—to the tune of $1.4trn, by one estimate. And officials are also worried about the possible cost to the country’s energy security. China has to import most of its oil and gas but it has plenty of coal.
China’s cautious approach to coal comes at a big cost to the planet. Its coal-fired power sector creates about 15% of global carbon-dioxide emissions from fossil fuels. By keeping the fires burning it is undercutting global efforts to combat climate change. Mr Miliband said he was making a case for climate “ambition”. Certainly there is a need for much more of that in Beijing.