Japan coal power plant export push hits U.S. resistance

The future...is coal.

Japan’s shipments of the equipment soared to nearly $8 billion last year as it looks to boost infrastructure exports, defying U.S. calls for developed nations to stop investment in foreign coal projects to curb greenhouse gas emissions.

So much for Japan's real concern about the environment. Can't let that get in the way of making some yen. To paraphrase the old saying " Money talks and environmental BS walks".

Coal will be around for many years to come, they havent yet found a cheaper way to make steel without it , Japanese should at least be selling the tech with carbon capture included.

Former VP Al Gore and his fictional "Inconvenient Truth" (banned in Britain as a text) is a huge source of this concern. Man-made global warming due to carbon dioxide emissions is heading to the ash heap of failed theories. The term was changed to "Climate Change" after the warming trend flat lined starting in the late Nineties. Note that this "concern" is coming from the US Executive Branch, not the Congress that writes the laws. We'll see if changes happen next year and again in 2017. The same group of people have enacted regulations that devastated the economies of several US States by forcing the shuttering of power plants and the coal mines that supplied them.

Meanwhile, Japan, Inc. can make a ton of money selling clean coal technology that captures sulfur and particulates which are a real problem, particularly in China and India. Please don't repeat "Kyoto Protocol".

Abe: "We don't need no stinking Kyoto Protocol."

@wtfjapan I assume you are talking about the carbon in steel. That is different from burning the stuff entirely which will send your kids future up in smoke.

@Jerome_from_Utah You many not believe in climate change but climate change believes in you.

Japanese should at least be selling the tech with carbon capture included.

Probably it is not that Japan does not want to sell cleaner technology, but that these development countries want dirtier and cheaper technology.

@scipantheist no last i checked you needed coal mixed burnt with iron ore to produce steel. until you find a cheaper alternative the steel makers will keep using mostly coal to produce the stuff.

Come on, U.S. is by far the biggest consumer of coal in the World next to China and they are worried about Japan providing coal technology to produce affordable energy to less developed smaller Countries for an insignificant amount??? Yeah lets not worry about the biggest carbon foot-print problems but restrict the poor from using any coal!!!