* This is my paper in BusinessWorld last October 21, 2019.
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KUALA LUMPUR — I came to the capital city of Malaysia to
speak at the Liberalism Conference of the Institute for Democracy and Economic
Affairs (IDEAS) last Saturday, along with the launching of the International
Property Rights Index (IPRI) 2019 by the Property Rights Alliance.
Whenever I go abroad I always observe how high or low the
energy use is of the cities that I visit. It is obvious that energy use here in
Kuala Lumpur is high — streets, tollways, buildings and other structures are
well lit at night, there are many MRT, LRT, and Monorail (running on
electricity) trips per hour and the MRT/LRT stations underground are well lit
and air-conditioned.
Malaysia has only 32 million people and its total
electricity generation in 2018 was 168 tera-watt hours (TWH). In contrast, the
Philippines has 108 million people and its electricity generation last year was
only 100 TWH. Malaysia depends largely on natural gas plus coal (65 + 68 TWH)
for power generation and this energy mix is similar to Japan’s.
I revisit two data sets that I put in my two recent
energy columns here. Again, data on coal consumption in million tons oil
equivalent (mtoe) is from the BP Statistical Review of World Energy (June
2019), data on population and GDP growth are from the World Bank, World
Development Indicators database (August 2019). Dividing coal consumption over
population, the kilos of oil equivalent (koe) per capita is derived. Growth
rates in coal use and GDP are averaged per 10 years.
Three trends and facts emerge from the numbers in the
table.
One, countries with high consumption of cheaper energy
like coal, represented by their high coal koe per capita, also have higher
income — Australia, South Korea, Taiwan, China, Japan, and Malaysia.
Two, the Philippines has the lowest, the smallest coal
consumption among the major and emerging Asian economies — only 153 koe per
person in 2018. Only one-fourth of Malaysia, one-sixth of Japan, one-ninth of
China, and only 1/11 of South Korea and greenie Australia. Hong Kong’s per
capita was 662 in 1998 and 837 in 2018 while Singapore’s was 0 in 1998 and 163
in 2018 or slightly higher than the Philippines. And the anti-coal groups and
people in the Philippines say that ours is already high and scary that we
should stop building new coal plants and retire soon existing ones? Lousy and
idiotic argument.
Three, there is clear correlation between growth in cheap
energy coal consumption and growth in GDP, at least for the countries covered
above. Australia, Japan, and South Korea decelerated coal use from 2006 to 2018
and they also experienced growth deceleration. Malaysia, Vietnam, India,
Indonesia, and the Philippines retained their high coal use and they also
retained their high GDP growth.
While most anti-coal groups are watermelon (green
outside, red inside) activists, some are outrightly pushing for their natural
gas business. Demonize coal, prevent the construction of more coal plants so
that the big distribution utilities and electric cooperatives will be forced to
buy from their soon imported and more expensive LNG power to prevent massive
blackouts in the country due to insufficient power supply.
Again, climate change is cyclical and natural, the
warming-cooling cycle having been going on since planet Earth was born some 4.6
billion years ago. This is nature-made global warming and global cooling, not
man-made or anthropogenic. The deceptive and dishonest “man-made” Climate
Change narrative is part of global and national corruption to justify endless
and rising oil/carbon taxes, renewables subsidies, climate loans, climate
bureaucracies, and junkets.
We need more energy security to sustain fast economic
growth and job creation. Cheap, stable and reliable energy that is dispatchable
on demand, requires less land per MW of power generation. It is not dependent
on the weather and requiring huge tracts of land that can otherwise be used for
more food production and forest protection.
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