Our guest blogger is Julian L. Wong, Senior Policy Analyst with the Energy Opportunity team.

China’s energy sector gets a bad reputation because of its heavy reliance on coal, which accounts for 80 percent of its electricity supply, and its continued appetite to expand coal power capacity at a rate of two coal power plants a week. While all of this is true, it’s not the full story.

The plants that China is currently building are some of the most efficient in the industry. And as the Wall Street Journal reported today, China has a concurrent program of shutting down small, inefficient coal plants:

The National Energy Administration said Thursday that since 2007 it had closed 54 gigawatts of coal- and oil-fired power plants as part of the cleanup plan. That would amount to about 7% of China’s current electricity-generating capacity.

According to the Associated Press, this capacity translates to a closure of “7,467 generating units, meeting a previously announced goal 18 months ahead of schedule.”

These reports come a few days after Greenpeace China released a report entitled “Polluting Power: Ranking of China’s Power Companies,” which analyzes China’s ten biggest power companies across various metrics such as coal consumption, carbon dioxide emissions, and share of renewable power. In sensationalistic fashion, Reuters tried to put an unhelpful gloss to Greenpeace’s report by proclaiming in a headline “Emissions of 3 big China power firms exceed UK,” conjuring images of ecological apocalypse. The Guardian has a similar headline.

No doubt, China’s reliance on coal makes it a leading carbon emitter, but this is hardly news. To say that “greenhouse gas emissions from the three biggest Chinese power firms in 2008 were higher than those of the entire United Kingdom” is rather meaningless without context.

We need to ask — how big are these firms? It is certainly not the case that China’s biggest three power plants are matching the entire UK in carbon emissions. China’s three biggest utility companies, with fleets of hundreds and hundreds of power plants accountable for 30 percent of the entire power supply for China and its 1.3 billion people (30 percent x 1.3 billion = 390 million), match the carbon emissions output of the entire economy of the UK and its 61 million citizens. Viewed in that light, China isn’t doing that badly.

The Greenpeace report is actually much more balanced and hopeful than the Reuters and Guardian headlines indicate. It rightfully points out the challenges that China’s biggest power firms face in terms of carbon emissions and environmental costs, but it also recognizes China’s achievements in increasing coal combustion efficiency and increasing renewable energy share in certain circumstances, in addition to its active program of shutting down plants.

Sensational headlines conveying half-truths can do much more harm than good. If we are to actively engage China in international energy and climate cooperation, we need to have an accurate understanding of what’s really happening there on the ground.

In April, Rep. John Shimkus (R-IL) said he knows with 100% certainty that humans can’t cause devastating sea level rise because God said in the Bible he would “never again” devastate humans with a flood again (see Rep. Shimkus: “Man will not destroy this Earth. This Earth will not be destroyed by a flood.” Rep. Barton: “I wish I had another dozen John Shimkuses on the committee.”).

Now, as ThinkProgress’s Lee Fang reports, Former House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-TX) has extended that doctrine.  Armey told GOP members of Congress on Capitol Hill yesterday that because “the lord God almighty made the heavens and the Earth … to his satisfaction … it is quite pretentious of we little weaklings here on earth to think that, that we are going to destroy God’s creation.”

Under Armey’s Gospel of Pollution (GOP), God made his creation invulnerable to all human action — not counting all the species we have wiped out, of course.  For some reason, God made them vulnerable.  Same for the forests we cut down.  And, of course, all the humans killed by human-generated toxins and pollution.  That’s why it’s a Gospel — you have to take it on faith.

And this guy was House Majority leader once!  Here’s the video in which Armey lays out his GOP to the GOP:

Lee Fang has the transcript and the story behind Armey’s “testimony”:

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$30B available to jumpstart renewable energy, ‘smart grid’ projects

The Energy Department is making up to $30 billion in loan guarantee authority available for renewable energy and electric grid modernization projects.

DOE announced yesterday it was ready to accept applications for about $8.5 billion in loan guarantee authority for advanced renewable energy projects made available in the department’s 2009 spending bill and $3.25 billion provided by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act to cover the subsidy costs that will unleash the billions of dollars in loan guarantee authority for renewable energy, transmission projects and biofuels….

“This administration has set a goal of doubling renewable electricity generation over the next three years,” Energy Secretary Steven Chu said in a statement. “To achieve that goal, we need to accelerate renewable project development by ensuring access to capital for advanced technology projects. We also need a grid that can move clean energy from the places it can be produced to the places where it can be used and that can integrate variable sources of power, like wind and solar,” he said.

New Energy Injects Hope in a Colorado Steel Town

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“If the slimehead were still a slimehead, it wouldn’t be in this kind of trouble,” begins a good WashPost story today on overfishing of the Orange roughy and other fish with popular nom de plumes. 

As lakes and oceans have been depleted by heavy fishing, the seafood industry tried to dress up what was left — former ‘trash’ species, and unfamiliar fish from the deep ocean — with new names to improve their popularity.

The Post story is based on a major report on the world’s seafood stocks published in Science, “Rebuilding Global Fisheries” (subs. req’d), which found that 63 percent of assessed fish stocks, species are below healthy levels.  I feel compelled to note that the lead author of this major report on overfishing is Boris Worm.  I can only imagine what he went through as a child….

Worm predicted that “if fishing continued at the same rate, all the world’s seafood stocks would collapse by 2048.”  The world’s fish catch “has grown more than fivefold since 1950.”  The result:

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