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Coal is king in China. The nation’s hunger for energy appears insatiable. Oil, costing more than $60 (£31) a barrel, is too expensive. Nuclear power is a distant option. Giant hydroelectric projects, such as the Three Gorges Dam, generate a mere fraction of the demand. Wind power and other alternative technologies make a minimum impact.

So China is digging furiously and fast in more than 21,000 mines. Last Wednesday Zeng Peiyan, a vice- premier, disclosed that coal output had doubled in the past five years. The nation will use 2.5 billion tons in 2007.

Along with such dizzying statistics goes another: the world’s worst casualty rate among miners. China’s media admitted to 3,818 deaths in 2,456 accidents underground in 2006. Journalists say the real figure is higher because some disasters are covered up by mine bosses and local party leaders.

Yet there are humble winners, too. They include the inhabitants of an impoverished hamlet called Butou, for centuries isolated deep in a winding gorge off the Yangtze River in central China.

“In the old days it was an hour down the gorge to the Yangtze and only a small boat could do it,” said Li Xiankai, a village boatman.

After water levels rose behind the giant Three Gorges Dam, vessels up to 2,000 tons could navigate the Wuxia gorge. That allowed a small local mine to ship coal from a new dock at Butou, profiting from soaring prices. “We’ve got new houses, new jobs shipping the coal and the days when we had to carry loads on our backs down to the Yangtze are over,” said Li.

The upside of China’s dynamic growth, however, is offset by its disastrous side effects. “If we don’t protect our environment, our economic miracle will soon come to an end,” said Pan Yue, the outspoken head of the government’s state environmental protection bureau.

“Acid rain falls on one third of China’s land, most of our biggest seven rivers are poisoned, a quarter of our people have no clean drinking water and a third of them breathe polluted air,” he said. China is not bound by the Kyoto protocol, the international agreement to limit emissions of climate-changing gases.

Now Britain and other signatories to the controversial Kyoto accords face the prospect that they may in effect be made redundant by Chinese growth — plus the fact that the United States, which remains the world’s biggest polluter, has refused to sign.

“China is a developing country and we must protect our state interests and reject any duty on us,” declared a government statement.

Paradoxically, China’s emissions of sulphur dioxide, whose particles reflect sunlight back into space, are so huge that they are slowing global warming, say some scientists. But this will be gradually overwhelmed by its output of carbon dioxide, which warms the atmosphere.

Foreign countries are doing their utmost to persuade the Chinese of the merits of change.

A team of scientists from the bioenergy research group at Birmingham’s Aston University is helping to pioneer a technique to burn coal along with “biomass” of rice husks, straw, crop wastes and reeds.

Yet Beijing has proved unable to compel local leaders to spend money on filters that could cut sulphur emissions from smoke stacks by 95%. Nor will they buy new western technology for power stations, which could operate more cleanly and efficiently.

In the capital itself, however, authoritarian orders will ensure that athletes at the 2008 Olympics breathe freely: the worst coal-burning polluters have moved out and those that remain must shut for the duration of the Games. That pristine image will be a temporary illusion.

In the provinces of northern China’s coal belt, where perpetual fires burn in abandoned coal seams and entire villages occasionally subside into collapsed mineshafts, a clean future seems a distant dream — and the smoky deposits of soot mean that the Rolls-Royces have to be washed every day.

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