In the short run, it will cut down on lung diseases and acid rain, but it won't reduce carbon dioxide, which causes global warming. It's the most carbon-intense fuel source they could use, worse than oil and natural gas. Environmentalists have urged China to ''leap-frog'' the mistakes of Western nations and invest heavily in renewable energies like wind, water, and solar energy, which they say in the long run would be cleaner and even cheaper than coal. They have a lot of growing pains. Ab Flowers, a retired American energy consultant who has worked in China since 1981, says those who think China can survive with nuclear, gas, solar, and wind power are ''stupid people.
China has more coal than any country in the world.
That could prove costly. In the late '80s, Benxi, an industrial city in northeast China, was so polluted it routinely disappeared from satellite photos. The Chinese have called on industrial nations to reduce carbon dioxide emissions 15 percent from 1990 levels by 2010, but they are opposed to those commitments for developing nations like themselves, India, and Brazil. Meanwhile, as politicians and governments squabble, the stabilization of greenhouse gases, a priority of the 1992 Earth Summit, is evaporating The United States and most other nations have failed to live up to emission reduction promises made at Rio, where the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change was signed. There, industrial nations pledged to cap greenhouse emissions at 1990 levels by the year 2000.