Coal news and updates

An overloaded coal truck rumbles down from the steel factory and hits a bump, sending chunks of its black cargo skittering and click-clicking along the asphalt. Waiting by the roadside, a farmer swaddled in thick, cotton-padded winter clothing scrambles into onrushing traffic to pick up the pieces. Four hours a day, four days a week, the villager, whose surname is Shen, comes to a spot near her home where a never-ending procession of coal trucks runs into uneven pavement. A thousand little bumps in the road keep Shen and her husband from freezing in winter.

“If I don’t come out here, I stay cold,” Shen says as she drops a few more recovered chunks into a sooty burlap sack. In one winter, Shen says, she could burn more than 2 tons of coal, worth more than 1,800 yuan ($260). Across vast swaths of northern China’s countryside, residents go to great lengths to burn untreated coal in home stoves despite government efforts to ban the practice and introduce cleaner _ but costlier _ types of coal or electrical heating.

That dependence represents one of many challenges facing Beijing as it tries to curb the choking smog that’s become a flashpoint for public discontent with the ruling Communist Party. Experts say coal-fired power plants and steel and cement mills are the main contributors to year-round smog, but household coal-burning in rural areas is a major cause of the spike in pollution during winter, when thick, gray soup-like clouds of dust smother Chinese cities, often forcing highways and airports to close.

Middle-class Chinese have complained vociferously as smog blanketed Beijing over the New Year period. A picture of a high-speed train stained a deep brown after passing through smoggy regions went viral on social media, as did a blog post by a Beijing banker who railed against government corruption and propaganda and pleaded with officials to take action for the sake of their children. In June, a team of researchers from Princeton, the University of California, Berkeley, and Peking and Tsinghua universities in Beijing published a study that found that household coal use in winter contributed more small and deadly air particles than industrial sources, some of which are outfitted with carbon-capture technologies.

SOurce: Indian Express