Our headline is a rejiggering of a National Public Radio story from last year:
Why Is China Placing A Global Bet On Coal?
For something more detailed we have Boston University's Global Development Policy Center:
China's Global Energy Finance
Chinese policy banks provided $3.2 billion in financing to foreign governments in the energy sector in 2019, increasing the total amount of energy finance by China’s policy banks since 2000 to roughly $251.3 billion. The China Global Energy Finance database tracks and displays this overseas development finance in the energy sector provided by China’s two global policy banks—the China Development Bank and the Export-Import Bank of China....
....MUCH MORE
Of that quarter-trillion dollars (is that a lot of money? it seems like a lot of money) $51.8 billion was spent on coal and/or coal-fired plants.
For some reason I can't get HFC-23 out of my head. It's a refrigerant chemical that China used to rake in billions from the Kyoto treaty signatories (read German hausfraus).
HFC-23 is 12,000 times as potent a greenhouse gas as CO2.
They would build plants to make the stuff (as a byproduct of HFC-22) and then offer to shut them down for Kyoto cash. Based on the estimated lifetime production of the plants. Best guess is they netted $6 billion after construction costs.
After a while (years) the carbon credit people caught on and then we saw China's reaction:
Related:
Follow-up: Just How Much Coal Fired Power Is China Currently Planning/Building?"
