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Driving through the forward-thrusting city of Shenzhen in Guangdong province, past a landscape of newish apartment towers. Almost every unit in the 15 or so stories is using its small balcony to suspend a line of drying clothes. I gather from speaking to university students that an electric clothes dryer is an outlandish almost outrageous luxury. Question: What happens to China’s power consumption and carbon output when 200 million middle-class Chinese follow the gilded elite and decide that the dryer has become a convenience, even a necessity?
Carney // Apr 22, 2010 at 3:23 pm
Given China’s thick air pollution, hanging wet clothes out to dry seems tantamount to soiling them all over again. Think of the gray powder that adorns unwashed cars (other than in pollen season) and enables wags to write “wash me” – it all comes from tailpipes and smokestacks.
What’s interesting is that China is getting into methanol as an automobile fuel in a big way. Methanol burns cleanly, without the smoke, soot, and particulate matter that causes smog. Methanol can be made from coal (which both we and they have in abundance) as well as natural gas or any biomass without exception, including trash and sewage. Will we learn from them or be left behind?
The Open Fuel Standards Act (S. 835 and H.R. 1476) is currently under consideration in Congress; it would make methanol and ethanol compatibility a required standard feature, akin to seat belts, in most cars. This “flex fuel” capability would cost automakers only about $130 per car to add.
As for electricity generation, significant reductions in smog-producing coal plant and even residential coal emissions can be had for minimal cost (reducing CO2 output however is another story). And since China is a nuclear power, they can also expand nuclear power plants – once built, the power they generate is relatively cheap, if not as cheap as coal.