In January each year, political and business leaders and others gather at Davos in Switzerland to discuss ways of “improving the state of the world”.
At this year’s meeting, American actor, Leonardo DiCaprio, fiercely attacked the world’s use of fossil fuels, saying that “we simply cannot allow the corporate greed of the coal, oil and gas industries to determine the future of humanity”.
Meanwhile, in most of Asia, the use of coal for generating electricity is increasing.
Over the next 10 years in Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia and the Philippines, coal use in electricity generation will increase in both absolute terms and relative terms (that is, as a proportion of total electricity generation).
In India and China in this period, coal use will also increase in absolute terms. It will decline in relative terms from its current high level of over 70%, but remain the dominant energy source for electricity production.
The main reason for this increasing use of coal is not corporate greed, but the desire of Asian governments to improve the lives of their citizens.
For nearly all the developed countries represented at Davos, the growth of coal-fired electricity was one of the backbones of their development in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Asian developing countries see their future in similar terms in the 21st century.
As shown in the following table on electricity consumption per capita (in megawatt hours in 2013), Asia still has a long way to catch up:
| United States | 13.0 | China | 3.8 | India | 0.8 |
| Australia | 10.1 | Thailand | 2.5 | Philippines | 0.7 |
| Japan | 7.8 | Vietnam | 1.3 | Cambodia | 0.2 |
| Malaysia | 4.5 | Indonesia | 0.8 | Myanmar | 0.2 |
Source: International Energy Agency
But in the past 40 years, China has shown the way, with an enormous increase in electricity production and consumption.
This has allowed electricity consumption per capita to increase from a level in 1975 that was the same as Myanmar’s now, to a level today that exceeds that of nearly every other Asian developing country.
All this on the back of coal.
For Asian developing countries, access to cheap electricity is critical to their economic advancement. And coal in turn is critical to this. For cost and reliability, nothing at present can compete with it.
Mr DiCaprio and his supporters at Davos should show more understanding of these issues. Otherwise, Davos will end up as Europe’s counterpart to North Korea – a hermit kingdom, divorced from the world around it.
