Net Zero’s dirty secret: Britain’s green transition is powered by Chinese coal
By Paul Homewood
New Statesman analysis of climate and trade data exposes how much the UK’s net-zero agenda depends on cheap foreign coal power, particularly from China.
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The UK’s top four trade partners are Germany, the US, China and the Netherlands. All four of these countries have a significantly larger share of coal-fired electricity in their energy supply than the UK does. This means that goods produced in factories in those countries will typically have a higher emissions footprint than those produced in UK factories.
China’s power grid is particularly carbon-intensive, with coal-fired power plants running 60 per cent of its grid. The UK has capitalised on cheap imports made using low-cost Chinese coal power, with imports from China to the UK more than doubling in value over the past decade.
For its part, China has positioned itself as a leader in the production of clean technologies such as batteries and solar panels (80 per cent of the global supply of which is manufactured in China). These too are made using cheap coal-fired electricity, which helps China to undercut other countries. China is also trying to dominate the extraction and processing of minerals key to the energy transition. It is responsible for 60 per cent of global production of rare earth elements, which are crucial for low-carbon technologies.
“For other countries, the choice is between making use of China’s low-cost supply chain, but with the risk of reliance on China, or building their own supply chains using a combination of trade protectionism and subsidies to offset China’s subsidies and cost advantages,” said Lauri Myllyvirta of the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air.
The UK’s reliance on China’s low-cost clean tech and mineral exports can be seen in HMRC trade data, which reveals how the UK imported large shares of its energy transition technologies and products from China in 2022 – including 64 per cent of rare earth metals and 49 per cent of lithium batteries.
Via its Belt and Road initiative, China was for many years by far the largest financier of new coal power plants worldwide – until Xi Jinping, the Chinese president, told the UN General Assembly in September 2021 that China would build “no new coal power plants abroad”. There have been loopholes, however, that have enable China to finance the construction of some coal-fired plants that power industrial facilities rather than the national grid. These are known as “captive” power plants.
China-backed captive power plants are a particularly significant phenomenon in Indonesia. The country uses captive coal power to smelt nickel, a metal central to the production of batteries used in electric vehicles. Indonesia is the world’s largest producer of nickel. A 2020 ban in Indonesia on the export of unprocessed nickel ore, designed to maximise the value of Indonesian nickel within Indonesia itself, has further increased demand in the country for nickel smelters powered by captive coal power plants.
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
And I guess if you did a top 20 you would find India and Australia in there, and SA not far behind.
PLEASE!, Do not watch the last episode of Attenbollox’s Planet Earth – especially the last 15 minutes – or your TV will suffer!!
This program should be prosecuted for the abject propaganda it contains. The BBC is nothing more than a sector of Goebbel’s own Ministry.
I am FUMING!!!!
Apologies if this is in the wrong place…
Years ago, Attenborough’s wild life programmes were ground breaking and very watchable.
He has now, in his old age, become so obsessed with the climate change myth that his programmes have become unwatchable – I just avoid then to keep my blood pressure under control
This is the inconvenient truth about the UK’s net zero agenda. Put bluntly it is nothing of the sort. All we are doing is virtue signalling whilst pushing our carbon emissions and energy security overseas. The net effect of global carbon dioxide will be up just like it always is despite 28 COP love-ins.
However, as emissions of CO2 make no difference to anything, I guess it really doesn’t matter.
As they say, net zero is at best like squeezing a ballon.
Since green energy is a de-industrialization policy, this de-industrialization also inevitably leads to demilitarization.
There are lots of reasons China is interested in helping the west transition th green energy.
What nearly all politicians and the media refuse to admit is that all of the Global Warming fraud is about destroying Western economies to bring about a Marxist / Socialist world .https://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/climate-change-scare-tool-to-destroy-capitalism/
So putting up prices for everything and shifting our money abroad is just part of the plan .
Most people just do not realise this , or refuse to believe it .
Plus many!!
I betcha nearly all politicians and the media can’t spell sentient.
I’m just not understanding what our politicians and the extremists thought would happen? We can’t do without all the stuff a modern economy needs and you can’t transition to Green tech without using fossil fuels, at least for much of that transition. The morons in charge appear to believe Green tech can be made using Green tech somehow. But that only happens at the end-point.
The UK has been exporting its carbon emissions for years.
Just like BEVs, CO2 emissions transferred from the exhaust pipe to the power stations. The same now with wind power, C02 transferred from the turbines to the gas-fired power stations backing them up.
All part of the Net Zero delusion.
In order to meet the crazy net zero, we are paying our Chinese and Indian owned steel works to close their blast furnaces, which will mean UK can no longer produce high grade steel from iron ore. (rail lines, structural steel, plate for military purposes, warships, submarines and tanks etc) They are switching to arc furnaces which use scrap steel, making low quality steel (“tin” cans, domestic white goods)
High grade steel we will buy from China and India made in the same design of blast furnace that we are closing, producing the same amount of carbon dioxide that UK would have produced. WHAT IS THE POINT OF THIS?
Strategically just selling our primary steel making plants to Chinese and Indian owners was just plain crazy and now paying to convert blast furnaces to arc furnaces, just to achieve absolutely no overall carbon dioxide reduction is plain stupid, unless of course we ban the import of high grade steel, which as Sultan Al Jaber said prior to COP28 will indirectly take us back into caves.
Incredible to think that we could allow foreign (Australian) investment to open a new coalmine in Cumbria. This would employ British people to mine the coal, British trains and workers to transport it to the steel works for British workers to make the steel for the wind turbines in British waters to be installed by British workers. All the money and wealth retained in Britain.
Instead, the party claiming to represent the British worker (Labour) say NO we must NOT do that, we must give our money to foreign workers with likely much poorer working conditions to use their coal and iron to make steel for the wind turbines to be installed and owned by foreign countries to make all the profit at our expense.
YCMIU
Ray, I bet that your MP – or any of ’em – would understand a word of what you said (as true as it is). Those MPs who do not accept it are making their money while they can; those who do are cowards.
That’s not how economies work. The “wealth” is in the end-use. If we do all that to produce electricity that is less efficient and more expensive, we are destroying wealth, not creating it.
To Phoenix, I was using the example of wind turbine construction purely as an example against the net zero mantra. Personally I can come up with lots of better uses for British manufactured high quality steels rather than needlessly importing them. Security is one important consideration.
As if we actually make many white goods in this country…
And why should we? As Ricardo pointed out 250 years ago, do what you are best at. White goods are largely commoditised, low value things, so why woukd we want to make them?
” … will typically have a higher emissions footprint than those produced in UK factories.”
Implying that the UK still has factories.
Is there a report with numbers and trends? Is there a recent up-tic?
Many products once made in the U. S. were off-shored well before the “climate crisis” got a start. A friend worked at this place — Cincinnati_Milling_Machine_Company
Search it up and read to the end. Note the current work is in India.
My friend became a dentist.
“My friend became a dentist.”
From milling to drilling.
Bit of a climb down from ‘workshop of the world’ but not nothing.
https://www.export.org.uk/news/651143/UK-overtakes-France-as-eighth-largest-manufacturer-as-Badenoch-celebrates-one-year-in-trade-role.htm
Thanks.
UK manufacturing GVA in 1990 was £125 billion. In 2022 it was £203 billion (real terms).
Let’s not forget that CO2 has a negligible effect on the weather
Germany now uses more coal having closed its nuclear plants. I wonder if they are still No. 1 anyway as their industrial collapse gathers pace due to their high energy costs.
Except it’s not a dirty secret, it’s a self-evident truth which has been staring us in the face for years. We’ve decimated our own manufacturing and heavy industries via punitive legislation and sky high ‘renewables’ driven energy prices and instead outsourced the manufacturing of the materials and components necessary to achieve our ‘clean’ energy transition to countries which use cheap fossil fuels to power their industrial base, especially China, which was not obliged by the terms of the Paris Accord to decarbonise anywhere near as rapidly as industrial western nations; in fact, they went on building coal fired power stations by the dozen. The whole thing has been an absurd farce from the very beginning, there for all to see. Dirty it is, secret it is not.
I’m completely unclear what this all supposed to mean? The chart shows imports but lots of those imports don’t go near coal e.g. agriculture products from the Netherlands, services from the US. Our biggest import from the US is oil and oil products.
As for “using a combination of trade protectionism and subsidies to offset China’s subsidies and cost advantages” that just means it will all be very expensive and displace other, more sensible ways of using our capital and labour. So we choose the really expensive way of making more expensive and less efficient stuff.
As far as I can tell, this simply confirms that Net Zero is a badly thought out, top down, poorly planned load of nonsense.
Net Zero is just a slogan masquerading as a plan.
History has a way of repeating itself (you know the rest)….but I’m thinking that, once again, we (not sure yet quite how many of ‘we’ there are) have come to the point where the NZCs need to be defeated once more before they ruin Western society. Just to expand on the simile: I look on the JSO crowd as the modern-day Brown-shirts of the 1930s (but JSO idiots don’t do history).
Harry those are my exact thoughts – particularly re the SA. I have posted much along the same lines (though from a different angle) regarding the Just Stop the Pylons article. We are getting very close to literally having to fight back.
Props.
Strangely I think the thing that is going to kill off the Net Zero stupidity, is what happened, and is still happening with the covid jab. And this puts the science very well: “After the mRNA ‘vaccines’ is was assumed (by me … [i.e. Mike Yeadon a leading scientist who worked in the area and early on warned it was not safe] … and others) that our bodies will manufacture spike protein. We now expect significant proportions of aberrant, nonsense proteins. Worse, we’ve no idea what they’ll do & nor does anyone else who’s willing to talk.”
And coincident with the jab roll out, the excess deaths rose and they have not dropped again. And, there is still general denial that it even matters that excess deaths rose or that the jab could be responsible.
I think as the covid jab scandal gradually comes to the boil, it will not just cause those who currently talk about net zero to start talking about “compensation” for “we who took the jab”, but it will also make everyone a lot more sceptical about the numerous claims that are pushed by “experts” and the role of internet companies and legacy media is pushing through these scandals.
In the aftermath of scepticism after the covid jab scandal breaks, net zero and much of the other non-science like EVs are going to totally forgotten
Just like the Global Warming fraud , the Covid Vaccine scandal is hardly being mentioned in the media , and there are many attempts to cover up all of the excess deaths .https://www.forbes.com/sites/mollybohannon/2023/11/30/texas-ag-sues-pfizer-over-covid-vaccine-effectiveness/
So it might take a lot more work , [ like Paul,s site is doing here , ] before enough people get to realise what is going on in the world .
I wonder if France’s coal generation will increase as I had read somewhere that they were using them more to be able to export more electricity. Germany has certainly increased its imports to keep its grid going which while it might seem irrelevant to us, with a commodity the price rises in line with demand. As we need to import to keep our grid going, the price we have to pay will increase.
This issue alone SCREAMS that the obsession by the Climatistas looking at everything in the West through a microscope while at the same time ignoring the actions of China is ONLY political. If they really are serious then why ate XR and JSO not permanently parked outside the Chinese Embassy?
They know all of this. Once Net Zero has destroyed our industry they will introduce the next planned step which is to Net Zero our consumption.