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CLIMATE CHANGE AND ENERGY

Can Wyoming Diplomats Build A Bridge Of Clean Coal To China?

By Todd Wilkinson, 11-20-06

	In two years, Beijing will host the 2008 Summer Olympic Games. Today, a view of the booming modern city from the perspective of the ancient "Tower of Realizing Shamefulness", reveals a metropolis which, even on a bright sunny day, is choked by serious air pollution. In many populated areas of the country, the industrial burning of coal to make electricity has caused not only unprecedented human health challenges but it represents one of the major inputs of carbon dioxide into Earth's atmosphere which is accelerating global climate change. Photos by Todd Wilkinson

Grant Larson sets a brisk pace at the front of our pack. The 73-year-old politically-conservative president of the Wyoming Senate, recently re-elected to another term, is in China as a U.S. citizen rather than acting in any official state capacity.

He is leading a delegation from the Jackson Hole Center For Global Affairs up steep steps toward the summit of Beijing's ancient Drum Tower. The official enduring name of this monolith, its origin dating back to 1272 and the reign of Kublai Khan, is the Tower of Realizing Shamefulness. For centuries, the promenade was utilized by various ruling dynastic emperors to stroke the official time in a watchless world. Today, drummers gather ceremoniously every half hour.

Our tourist slog up steep stairs may be relatively short, but it's no less formidable in grade than the slope of Snow King Mountain, a destination ski area, rising above the town to Jackson, Wyo. back home. Reaching the precipice, the surprisingly nimble, white-haired Larson is left breathless, not only from the commanding vista, but the hazy air muting the view in all directions is opaque, chock full of acrid industrial pollutants from Beijing's growing auto society and China's Dickensian factories upwind.

Only 25 percent of Chinese families in Beijing own cars but the ranks of motorists, who are giving up bicycles for the car, could easily double over the next decade. When it does, it will set the new global standard for gridlock. In just two years, however, the world spotlight will be on China's capital as the most populous country on Earth hosts the summer Olympic games. In order to comply with pollution standards mandated by the Olympic Committee, the People's government is planning to impose strict restrictions on car travel and order factories to be shut down weeks in advance to clear out the air. Experts say the Olympics will stand as the only exception the Chinese are willing to make in turning off the switch on its roaring engine of growth.

China is booming, churning forward faster than any other modern economy and the drummers at the ancient tower cannot keep pace.

As one prominent local citizen says, "The country is one big construction site." That's no exaggeration and it is being powered by coal.

Reaching the speed of modernity has not come without profound, mind-boggling costs. There are widespread shortages of water, for one, related to industrial activities. The aqua that is available is too sullied for human consumption. Some Chinese rivers have either run dry or can be walked across on a path of detritus covering the water.

But the most obvious trapping, one that leaves a hacking cough in the back of the throat, is air pollution.

Health care costs and lost worker productivity associated with bad air in this nation of 1.3 billion gnaws away at 15 percent of China's GDP annually. That figure, too, is rising. What does it matter to Americans, Westerners, and indeed to inhabitants of seemingly insulated Jackson Hole how breathable the air is on the other side of the world?

As David Wendt, who serves as president of the Jackson Hole Center for Global Affairs says, "where climate change is concerned, China's destiny is our own."

Whether we choose to accept this premise or not, inexorably Wendt's assessment cannot be dismissed.

A thousand miles west of boom-boom Beijing and Shanghai in the Shanxi Province, Wyoming and Montana share with this region of China a kindred blessing: Coal. Lots of it. A mother lode of carbon that, despite what some environmentalists hope, is not going to sit latent in the ground, unused.

Not long ago, I spoke with a senior manager of Kennecott Energy based in Gillette, Wyoming and he says there's enough high quality, easily accessible coal in the Powder River Basin and adjacent geological strata to last easily for the next 100 years.

One can shake a finger at coal and wish that it, as a power source, would just go away in favor of wind, solar, hydro, ethanol and hydrogen, or perhaps see it as a gift to humankind, but exploiting it is going to be a fact of life for decades to come.

China is a sobering testament, dependent on coal to bring its economically and socially repressed people into the 21st century. The paradox being wrestled with is this: How to raise the standard of living, utilizing fuels of the Industrial Age but simultaneously trying not to destroy any hope of addressing carbon dioxide outputs that are accelerating climate change?

More than 75 percent of China's energy needs today are met by burning coal and turning it into electricity. In the next few years, more than 500 coal-fired power-generating plants are scheduled to come on line. In addition, Shanxi Province has over 400 coke smelters, ranging in size from mom and pop operations to Pittsburgh-esque kilns. They represent the foulest smokestacks on Earth.

"Cleaner energy is not just a Shanxi problem, it is not just a Wyoming problem, it is a world problem," notes Wyoming State Senator Larson.

Sharing Larson's concern on our trip to China is Jackson Hole native son John F. Turner, a former U.S. assistant Secretary of State in the Bush Administration, former national director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service under President George Herbert Walker Bush, a current board member of Peabody Coal, and a man with extensive diplomatic experience abroad.

"Coal obviously is a workhorse here in the United States and a workhorse in China because of its ability to produce power," Turner said when he was still serving as assistant secretary of state for Oceans and Environmental and Scientific Affairs under Colin Powell. Turner was widely praised as the greenest member of the Bush Administration.

Plants and kilns in China, largely unfitted with any pollution control technology, plumes tons of mercury, lead, sulfur, carbon-dioxide and other pollutants into the sky, casting a perpetual gloom of smog over China that literally blocks out the sun. If you believe the U.S. is immune, consider scientific studies showing that sand related to the desertification of China's northern territories up along the border with Mongolia are literally blowing across the Pacific Ocean and settling on American soil. Air pollution is even more ubiquitous in its effect on the atmosphere.

"Climate change poses a global problem that will require a global response," Turner notes. "The United States and China share a common responsibility in this regard."

Not to diminish the impact of oil and gas discharges in Wyoming's Jonah Field, Pinedale Anticline and Powder River Basin, but the pollution of Shanxi puts the haze drifting over the Wind River Mountains into sharp perspective.

The aesthetic appearance of air pollution in China is like that of forest fire smog hanging heavy in our towns, only it happens most days of the year with little protection afforded humans and in particular the hundreds of millions of young people who will spend their growing years inhaling it.

It may seem strange that one of the catalysts for thoughtful discussions about clean coal and climate change between the last remaining global superpowers happens to be the Jackson Hole Center for Global Affairs. This little entity was the brainchild of a former Jackson Hole Chamber of Commerce director, a local economist, a couple of international, conservation-oriented business people who have vacation homes, like Vice President Dick Cheney does, in the Tetons, and some local, home-grown daydreaming of how to effect positive change in the world.

Yes, for cynics out there who it as little more than a bunch of feel-good froth, a tangible outgrowth has been these still-evolving discussions between Wyomingites and residents of Shanxi that now have caught the attention of decisionmakers in Beijing and Washington, D.C.

Every climate change expert points out that any hope of curbing carbon emissions to slow the rapid rising temperature resides foremost in three nations: the U.S., and then followed closely by China and India, the two most populous nations undergoing profound economic transformation that is riding on the back of the fossil fuel age.

Larson, a conservative Republican, is not known as an environmentalist. He has no fondness for wolves, is generally suspicious of land use planning, and regards wilderness preservationists as being out of touch with people who make their living on the land. At the same time, he does not discount the concerns over air quality expressed by his Wyoming constituents and groups like The Wilderness Society over energy growing pollution in his booming state, but he says, pragmatically, that China's challenges are so monumental they deserve attention.

	Grant Larson, an old sage westerner in the Republican Party, today ironically represents a political agent of change in talking about global environmental issues. Attending the U.S.-China Clean Coal Forum in Shanxi Province this autumn, Larson believes that Wyoming, Montana and Shanxi, which is the largest coal-producing area of China, can together set an example for how to utilize the best of emerging clean coal technology. Here, the president of the Wyoming State Senate hams it up with an entrepreneurial rickshaw driver in the famous walled city of Pinyao. Some observers are pushing for the state legislatures of both Wyoming and Montana to work togther and call upon the federal government to help establish pilot coal-gasification projects, which are a vast improvement over existing technology.

Both regions, whose fates are intertwined, can learn from one another and set a new international standard if they take action, he says. The alternative of doing nothing is a burden that will be imposed upon future generations and that, Larson adds, is unacceptable.

Allow me here to admit a bias in my original perspective: I was initially skeptical. I was incredulous that a fairly obscure outfit like the Jackson Hole Center for Global Affairs could play ANY significant role in a globally daunting issue like energy development or that the partnership being solidified between Wyoming and Shanxi could produce any tangible dividends.

But I now believe I was wrong. Consider the players. Place them within the context of the political sea change that has just occurred in D.C. and across the hinters of the country. The Jackson Hole Center is poised today to help push for the larger nation-to-nation discussion about clean energy that must happen.

Sitting near Larson and Turner in Shanxi Province was Rob Wallace, also a born and bred Wyomingite, former political staffer for U.S. Sen. Malcolm Wallop and today a senior executive with General Electric, which is making a huge investment in energy development in China.

Next to Wallace was Judd Swift, current assistant secretary in the U.S. Department of Energy who quietly, behind the scenes, has been trying to advance a strategy involving governments and private business to sequester carbon [i.e. keeping carbon dioxide earthbound instead of having it escape into the atmosphere where it hastens climate change].

Also delivering a presentation to the Chinese was Susan Capalbo, principal investigator for the Big Sky Regional Carbon Sequestration Partnership based at Montana State University in Bozeman. Capablo's office, one of a handful of regional labs established by the DOE across the country, is examining such possibilities as injecting carbon produced from coal smokestacks back into the ground.

Back here in the U.S., there are others I will should mention, among them Wyoming Gov. Dave Freudenthal, a Democrat, and U.S. Sen. Craig Thomas, a Republican, and Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer, U.S. Senator-elect Jon Tester, and veteran Sen. Max Baucus, who have large public profiles within the Democratic Party.

Together, this bi-partisan assemblage has the interest and power, if they wish to exercise it, to make clean coal technology a national priority in Congress and the White House.

For the moment, ponder this: It's a remarkable thing, really, to be in China and hear a former senior official in the U.S. state department and one of the senior state Republican lawmakers in the Wyoming legislature talking openly about climate change being both a real and a serious threat to the environmental future of the planet.

Add in the governors and senators from both parties and it shows leaders, who refuse to let the U.S. remain stalled on action, are bypassing the Bush Administration's inertia.

At the same time, it is equally poignant to note that their colleagues in China, which include the Beijing office of the conservation organization, The Natural Resources Defense Council, also show no reservation in accepting that the human causes of climate change need to be confronted.

	Writer Todd Wilkinson outside the shrine to Mao between Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City in Beijing.

The question is how?

Members of the Wyoming delegation contemplated answers this fall in the Shanxi city of Taiyuan along with their Chinese counterparts at the U.S.-China Clean Coal Forum. The emphasis is on dramatically transitioning from the old way of burning coal to make electricity into the best available technology called IGCC, an acronym which stands for Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle. More on that later.

Emerging from those talks, hailed privately by some members of the Bush Administration, is an unprecedented memorandum of understanding that establishes a foundation for a joint approach to clean coal technology possibly being ramped up in both the American West and China.

Can their strategy succeed?

Sen. Thomas already has drafted legislation, in a partnership with U.S. Sen. Diane Feinstein of California, to explore the construction of an IGCC pilot project somewhere in Wyoming.

Following the lead of landmark legislation signed into law this year by Republican California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to dial back carbon emissions and establish a carbon-trading program, the northern Rockies could be the next frontier for innovation. Moreover, it could serve as a model for similar strategies being adopted in China.

"The experiences that we will see in terms of a much more active global trading market for carbon will have to come in response to more government mandated programs," Capalbo says. "There's no other way around it. But at the same time there is going to be great opportunity for industry to capitalize on the challenge by being part of any solution to this serious problem. Not doing anything isn't a strategy."

Old companies like GE, Wallace adds, see this as the next revolutionary step, no different from the one that moved society in the 19th century from candles and whale oil to the incandescent bulb.

The Jackson Hole Center for Global Affairs has seized its own place on the world stage by thinking beyond the contentious Kyoto Protocol.

Here's an added reality: Before a mass movement to confront climate change and domestic energy security occurs, it requires that visionary individuals serve as catalysts.

With the Vice President of the United States owning a home in Jackson Hole's exclusive Teton Pines neighborhood, any swift action is possible if it starts from the top.

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