Regarding the column by Gu Bin entitled “China Belt and Road Initiative must stop financing new coal power” (Opinion, July 6), the world has to finance new coal power plants, but selectively, rather than not at all.
According to One World in Data, there are still about 940m people in the world who do not have basic electricity, mainly in Africa and Asia.
It is the developed world’s responsibility to make sure that it does not continue to pollute using fossil fuel energy as it polluted the world first by industrialisation, by which it accumulated a large amount of wealth.
It is now its responsibility to use that wealth to finance the construction of power plants that can supply affordable electricity to those in poor countries currently lacking basic power supply. Renewable energy and carbon capture technology etc are too distant for these people.
Tony SK Li
Hong Kong
