Following the annual Central Economic Work Conference last month, the government said it will “channel more energy into weak areas, including infrastructure.” The official English-language China Daily reported on December 18, that China's National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), the country’s top planning agency, has already sped up approvals of transportation sector projects. It said the value of 147 projects approved in the third quarter reached 697.7 billion yuan (U.S. $101.1 billion), rising nearly fivefold over the previous period. A provincial NDRC official was quoted as saying that local governments have prepared “a large number of projects that are able to play a role in stabilizing the economy.” The Party's official newspaper People’s Daily reported last month that China is expected to build hundreds of new general aviation airports by 2020. 95 billion yuan (U.S. $13.8 billion) has also been earmarked for four new lines in Suzhou city of eastern Jiangsu province. On December 19, the NDRC also approved 298 billion yuan (U.S. $43.3 billion) worth of urban rail projects for nearby Shanghai. Meanwhile, China Daily said that Transport Minister Li Xiaopeng said on December 26, that 1.8 trillion yuan (U.S. $261.7 billion) is expected to be invested in road and rail infrastructure projects in 2019. Separately, according to the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) the new projects are bound to have consequences for coal consumption, which rose 0.4 percent in 2017, the highest rate since 2013. Last month, an international group of climate scientists at the Global Carbon Project projected that China’s coal consumption in 2018 climbed 4.5 percent, driving carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions up 4.7 percent. The group identified China’s increased coal use as the leading factor in last year’s worldwide rise in CO2 by 2.7 percent. The NBS said in the first 11 months of 2018, raw coal production jumped 5.4 percent from a year earlier. While the Paris-based International Energy Agency (IEA) estimated that demand will edge down at a compound average annual rate of 0.5 percent over the period from 2016 through 2023, the new infrastructure projects will boost demand for energy-intensive products including steel and cement. Already China produces and consumes about half of the world’s coal.
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