India is set to overtake China as the biggest importer of power-station coal. Indian thermal-coal imports will surpass China’s by 2017 or sooner, Bloomberg Intelligence analysts William Foiles and Andrew Cosgrove said in a report. China, the world’s biggest energy consumer, is cutting down on coal use to fight pollution. India and its regional peers including Indonesia, Vietnam, Japan and South Korea plan to increase their combined coal-fired generating capacity by more than 204 gigawatts, or 60%, through 2019, as per the report. —Bloomberg, 17 April 2015
India has announced that it will double its coal use by 2020, in the process overtaking the U.S. as the world’s second largest coal consumer after China. The International Energy Agency predicts that global coal demand, along with that of oil and gas, will still be rising in 2040, when fossil fuels will account for three-quarters of energy use. Asia in particular is destined for an enormous burst of coal investment. A great deal of the funding will likely come from the new Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, AIIB, an initiative promoted by China in the face of staunch U.S. opposition. The AIIB initiative ‚Äì and its boost to coal-fired funding ‚Äì leaves the U.S. president looking even more lonely on the geopolitical shore, a lame duck Canute vainly commanding the seas — and smokestacks — not to rise. –Peter Foster, Financial Post 17 April 2015
The International Monetary Fund on Tuesday forecast India’s growth to strengthen from 7.2 per cent in 2014 to 7.5 per cent in both 2015 and 2016, overtaking China’s growth — for the first time since 1999 — that it projected will slow down to 6.8 per cent. The country is attempting to shift from consumption to investment-led growth, at a time when China is undergoing the opposite transition, the Bank said in its bi-annual South Asia Economic Focus report. –Puja Mehra, The Hindu, 15 April 2015
India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi is typically called “controversial” or “divisive,” which means the liberal establishment of India and internationally doesn’t like him. I don’t know if he deserves the accolade as the “Ronald Reagan of India,” but I hear he has some reformist instincts about opening up India’s economy and fighting corruption. One thing his government has done is tell Obama and the UN to go stuff it on climate change. While India mouths a few platitudes, for the most part they talk sense, saying they’re going to increase coal production, for example. –Steven Hayward, Power Line, 16 April 2015
It’s a manifesto smackdown, a fight among the members of the green Left for the intellectual and moral high ground. It’s also a fight that reflects the growing schism within American environmentalism. On one side are the pro-energy, pro-density humanists. On the opposite side are the anti-energy, pro-sprawl absolutists. The group’s backers — who include former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg — have pledged some $60 million in funding for the effort, which aims to shutter half of U.S. coal plants by 2017. –Robert Bryce, National Review, 17 April 2015
A loose affiliation of millionaires and billionaires presides over a vast well-knit network of like-minded funders, government bureaucrats, and enviro-activists who manufacture phony grassroots campaigns and churn out bogus propaganda disguised as science and journalism in an effort to control economic decision-making across America. Between 2000 and 2012 some 26,500 distinct US-based environmental NGOs collected revenues of $81 billion ($6.6 billion per year). Having seized branches of government, they now lavish tax dollars upon the ENGOs. This enviro-regulatory regime is being gamed by rent-seeking crony capitalists from the renewable energy and pollution control industries who now number among environmentalism’s principal cheerleaders. –William Walter Kay, Ecofascism blog, 16 April 2015
