Following is an excerpt from an article by George Will, a columnist for the Washington

QUESTION:

Following is an excerpt from an article by George Will, a columnist for the Washington Post and Newsweek, entitled King Coal: Reigning in China. Discuss how he appeals to logos in this article on Chinas ravenous appetite for coal. from King Coal: Reigning in China GeorGe WiLL Half of the 6 billion tons of coal burned globally each year is burned in China. A spokesman for the Sierra Club, which in recent years has helped to block construction of 139 proposed coal-fired plants in America, says, This is undermining everything weve accomplished. America, say environmentalists, is exporting global warming. Can something really be exported if it supposedly affects the entire planet? Never mind. America has partners in this crime against nature, if such it is. one Australian company proposes to build the Cowlitz facility; another has signed a $60 billion contract to supply Chinese power plants with Australian coal. The Times says ships all burning hydrocarbons hauled about 690 million tons of thermal coal this year, up from 385 million in 2001. China, which imported about 150 million tons this year, was a net exporter of coal until 2009, sending abroad its low-grade coal and importing higher-grade, low-sulfur coal from, for example, the Powder River Basin of Wyoming and Montana. Because much of Chinas enormous coal reserves is inland, far from coastal factories, it is sometimes more economical to import American and Australian coal. Writing in the Atlantic on Chinas appetite for coal and possible aptitude for using the old fuel in new, cleaner ways, James Fallows quotes a Chinese official saying that the countrys transportation system is the only serious limit on how fast power companies increase their use of coal. one reason China is building light-rail systems is to get passenger traffic out of the way of coal trains. Fallows reports that 15 years from now China expects that 350 million people will be living in cities that do not exist yet. This will require adding to Chinas electrical system a capacity almost as large as Americas current capacity. The united States, China, Russia and India have 40 percent of the worlds population and 60 percent of its coal.