How cleaner coal can play a part in China’s green ambitions

The accepted environmental wisdom is that what’s bad for the coal industry is good for the planet. To be sure, China must cut its coal use; the fossil fuel is the main culprit behind the nation’s massive carbon emissions that cause global warming as well as the thick toxic haze that blankets the country. However, there is another reality for China – an ailing coal industry hurts the efforts to fight climate change.

News about the Chinese coal industry only seems to get worse. Just this month, the coal logistics company Winsway Enterprises Holdings filed for bankruptcy. The firm was the latest casualty in the sector in which 20 out of the 28 domestically listed coal companies reported losses for 2015, with the average among the 10 largest firms exceeding 1.5 billion yuan (HK$1.8 billion).

A more poignant sign of the sector’s ills are the 1.3 million unemployed coal workers and their struggle to find a new means of living, as recently reported by the Post.

Decline and fall: the broken dreams of a Chinese coal-mining city struggling to address industrial overcapacity

Much of the Chinese coal industry’s pain has been self-inflicted after years of reckless expansion, motivated by pure greed when prices surged to historic highs of more than 1,000 yuan per tonne in 2011. Producers kept mining more coal with the belief that demand would not drop even amid a slowing Chinese economy, or that coal prices could crash – they have fallen by more than half to the current 12-year low of below 400 yuan per tonne.

The chill wind blowing through China’s ailing coal industry

While the sector’s demise may have proved producers wrong, many environmentalists view the industry’s decline as an inevitable part of China’s necessary transition to a low-carbon economy.