The missed story in China’s traffic jam

Seldom has energy transportation stirred up as much attention as the recent coal-truck-driven traffic tie-ups outside Beijing. Over the weekend, the Wall Street Journal‘s numbers guru, Carl Bialik, took the latest, long stab at intellectualizing crowded roads, but is there really much more to say about the 60-mile-long, 11-day traffic jam, and its successors?

Apparently so. For one thing, traffic jams seem to be entertaining. Moviematics.com describes a new traffic jam game for Google’s Android phone. And today Robert Curley is testing whether there is something viral in herds of cars and trucks — he writes of a Puerto Rican traffic jam resulting from the local government’s response to Hurricane Earl.

But there’s also a serious message in the road snarls. The U.S., Europe, their NGOs, their militaries, and their think tanks are fixated on the climate benefits of natural gas, alternative fuels, nuclear power, solar and wind. But meanwhile, China, like the rest of world, is still on a binge of so-called dirty fuel. As Bloomberg’s Matthew Carr writes, a plummet in global coal prices has underpinned a surge in coal demand, along with speculation by traders. That’s despite a similar plunge in natural gas prices that’s increasing its competitiveness with coal by power plants.

Coal’s plentitude and price make it too hard for many countries simply to give it up. As for what could force the issue, my own thinking is that China’s leaders aren’t politically suicidal — even if Beijing doesn’t accelerate a switch from coal for reasons of climate-change, it will eventually do so in order to appease its increasingly restive population, which has made it plain in recent months that it won’t tolerate runaway pollution.

One wonders whether the traffic jams are also a tipping point for China. China is building a new railroad to carry its coal, but the tracks aren’t scheduled to be finished until 2012, as Michael Wines writes in The New York Times. There could be something persuasive about two years stuck in traffic.