Seldom has energy transportation stirred up as much
attention as the recent coal-truck-driven traffic
tie-ups outside Beijing. Over the weekend, the Wall Street Journal's
numbers guru, Carl
Bialik, took the latest, long stab at intellectualizing crowded roads, but is
there really much more to say about the 60-mile-long, 11-day traffic jam, and
its successors?
Apparently so. For one thing, traffic jams seem to be
entertaining. Moviematics.com
describes a new traffic jam game for Google's Android phone. And today Robert
Curley is testing whether there is something viral in herds of cars and
trucks -- he writes of a Puerto Rican traffic jam resulting from the local
government's response to Hurricane Earl.
But there's also a serious message in the road snarls.
The U.S., Europe, their NGOs, their militaries, and their think tanks are fixated on the climate benefits of
natural gas, alternative fuels, nuclear power, solar and wind. But meanwhile,
China, like the rest of world, is still on a binge of so-called dirty fuel. As
Bloomberg's Matthew
Carr writes, a plummet in global coal prices has underpinned a surge in
coal demand, along with speculation by traders. That's despite a similar plunge
in natural
gas prices that's increasing its competitiveness with coal by power plants.
Coal's plentitude and price make it too hard for many
countries simply to give it up. As for what could force the issue, my own
thinking is that China's leaders aren't politically suicidal -- even if Beijing
doesn't accelerate a switch from coal for reasons of climate-change, it will
eventually do so in order to appease its increasingly restive population, which
has made it plain in recent months that it won't tolerate runaway pollution.
One wonders whether the traffic jams are also a tipping
point for China. China is building a new railroad to carry its coal, but the
tracks aren't scheduled to be finished until 2012, as Michael Wines
writes in The New York Times. There
could be something persuasive about two years stuck in traffic.
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