The 21st Century Coal Question: China, India, Development, and Climate Change
Department of Marine Sciences, Texas A&M University Galveston Campus, Galveston, TX 77554, USA
*
Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Atmosphere 2019, 10(8), 476; https://doi.org/10.3390/atmos10080476
Received: 11 July 2019
/
Revised: 13 August 2019
/
Accepted: 16 August 2019
/
Published: 20 August 2019
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Household Cooking and Space Heating: Effects on Air Pollution, Climate Change, and Human Health)
China and India are not only the two most populous nations on Earth, they are also two of the most rapidly growing economies. Historically, economic and social development have been subsidized by cheap and abundant fossil-fuels. Climate change from fossil-fuel emissions has resulted in the need to reduce fossil-fuel emissions in order to avoid catastrophic warming. If climate goals are achieved, China and India will have been the first major economies to develop via renewable energy sources. In this article, we examine the factors of projected population growth, available fossil-fuel reserves, and renewable energy installations required to develop scenarios in which both China and India may increase per capita energy consumption while remaining on trach to meet ambitious climate goals. Here, we show that China and India will have to expand their renewable energy infrastructure at unprecedented rates in order to support both population growth and development goals. In the larger scope of the literature, we recommend community-based approaches to microgrid and cookstove development in both China and India.
View Full-Text
Keywords:
climate change; China; India; renewable energy; modeling; international development
▼
Show Figures
Figure 1
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited
MDPI and ACS Style
Warner, K.J.; Jones, G.A. The 21st Century Coal Question: China, India, Development, and Climate Change. Atmosphere 2019, 10, 476. https://doi.org/10.3390/atmos10080476
AMA Style
Warner KJ, Jones GA. The 21st Century Coal Question: China, India, Development, and Climate Change. Atmosphere. 2019; 10(8):476. https://doi.org/10.3390/atmos10080476
Chicago/Turabian StyleWarner, Kevin J., and Glenn A. Jones. 2019. "The 21st Century Coal Question: China, India, Development, and Climate Change" Atmosphere 10, no. 8: 476. https://doi.org/10.3390/atmos10080476
Find Other Styles
Note that from the first issue of 2016, MDPI journals use article numbers instead of page numbers. See further details here.
