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Locustland | China burning as much coal as rest of world combined

Figures released by the US government show how quickly China's coal consumption rates have risen over the past decade.

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China burned through 325 million more tonnes of coal in 2011 than in 2010, according to the US Energy Information Administration, and consumption of the fossil fuel has grown an average of 9 per cent since 2000.

The Washington Post has parsed those and other numbers in a post here, where it includes a US government graph that shows China's coal consumption is set to surpass that of the rest of the world combined very soon.
At All Roads Lead to China, Richard Brubaker recently brought up the broader reason why Beijing's air pollution problem is unlikely to improve any time soon:

To put a few numbers to the above, when I went to Copenhagen in 2009 to participate in a pre-COP15 conference it was rumored that China would surpass the US as the 1 carbon emitter.  In the 5 years since that conference, China has almost doubled their carbon emissions.

China abroad

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