Half of the 6 billion tons of coal burned globally each year is burned in China. A spokesman for the Sierra Club, which in recent years has helped to block construction of 139 proposed coal-fired plants in America, says, “This is undermining everything we’ve accomplished.” America, say environmentalists, is exporting global warming…

Fallows reports that 15 years from now China expects that 350 million people will be living in cities that do not exist yet. This will require adding to China’s electrical system a capacity almost as large as America’s current capacity. The United States, China, Russia and India have 40 percent of the world’s population and 60 percent of its coal.

A climate scientist told Fallows that stabilizing the carbon-dioxide concentration in the atmosphere would require the world to reduce its emissions to Kenya’s level – for America, a 96 percent reduction. Nations with hundreds of millions of people in poverty would, Fallows says, have to “forgo the energy-intensive path toward wealth that the United States has traveled for so many years.”