An 11-Day Traffic Jam? How Coal Powered the Great Snarl of 2010
- China ·
- Coal ·
- Transportation
And you thought you had a bad morning commute.
For 11 days, reporters and bloggers stood agog at the news of a 60-mile traffic jam on a major highway from China's Inner Mongolia province to Beijing. Now that it's apparently been cleared up, the real story is what was inside that horizon-spanning column of heavy trucks: coal, really dirty coal, from China's frontier with Mongolia.
The Christian Science Monitor reported that authorities blamed road construction and accidents for the back-up. But, as the article notes, some of the problem lies in the road's use to transport cut-rate coal mined illegally in Inner Mongolia.
Damien Ma at The Atlantic adds that "much of the coal in China is now loaded onto trucks rather than freight trains because China's rail system has numerous bottlenecks and is often over-taxed, which ends up creating supply shortages to the coast." This equates to a situation in which trucks are inefficiently burning more fuel to move an already dirty fuel.
This particular coal, to make matters worse, is some of the dirtiest available in China. I reported in 2008 a study released by MIT researchers concluding that inefficient power plants are not really behind the coal pollution in China. In fact, China's power production has grown so quickly that a huge number of plants are actually relatively new and efficient. Rather, what's more responsible is the kind of coal these plants burn. China tends to rely on relatively cheaper and dirtier coal close to population centers on the east coast, rather than cleaner and pricier coal from the far northwest.
Sometimes powerful images convey the scale of a problem way better than a blog post. The images of coal trucks lined-up as far as the eye can see during the Great Snarl of 2010 is a clear and present reminder us of the physical scale of China's coal reliance.
Photo credit: A common Chinese cargo truck in Beijing by ernop.
Graham Webster
is a graduate student at Harvard and environment writer. He has worked as a journalist and consultant in Beijing and as an editor at the Center for American Progress.
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