Coal accounts for 67 percent of China's energy supply, a statistic cited in Jim Yardley's "China paying high price in pursuit of clean energy" in the New York Times this week.

China's insatiable appetite for energy is mostly being met with a building spree of coal-fired power plants. To ease its addiction to coal, China wants 15 percent of the country's energy consumption to come from renewable sources by 2020, compared with 7.5 percent today.

Solar, wind and biomass are expanding so quickly in China, the country might become a world leader in renewable energy -- but those sources will amount to less than four percent of the energy supply by 2020. That leaves 11 percentage points...

China plans to double its nuclear capacity by 2020, but that source would amount to only another four percent of the energy supply, and bring with it the environmental disasters of radioactive waste. That leaves 7 percentage points...

Three Gorges Dam on China's Yangtze River is the largest dam and the largest renewable energy plant in the world.

"The Three Gorges is the world's biggest dam, biggest power plant and biggest consumer of dirt, stone, concrete and steel. Ever. Even the project's official tally of 1.13 million displaced people made the list as record No.10... Chinese officials have admitted that the dam was spawning environmental problems such as water pollution and landslides that could become severe... Few if any hydropower projects have been more controversial than the Three Gorges. Entire cities were inundated along with ancient temples and other landmarks. Today, many of the people resettled by the project are still struggling to survive."

China wants to triple its hydro capacity by 2020. The country uses only about one-fourth of its hydropower potential. It isn't restrained -- for better or worse -- by the tight environmental regulations common in more developed nations.

It's easy for Westerners to condemn the building of large dams, when we take for granted hundreds of American dams built many generations ago. Even if we could go back to St. Louis or New Orleans in the late 1800's and somehow convince people that large dams were environmentally and socially detrimental, I still doubt we could then dissuade the leaders of the time from building them. We would be arguing in favor of the disastrous flooding, droughts, shipping difficulties and energy potential of the dams along the Mississippi River.

Is outright opposing China's hydro arguing in favor of coal?

Seemingly not. For one thing, China's considerable potential in geothermal energy is only beginning to be tapped, and leaders are well aware of the asset. See "China's Geothermal City Opens New Heating Utility" for more on China's experiments.

Geothermal energy represents less than one percent of China's energy supply (according to an article that I paradoxically can only find mirrored on a telecom-industry news site). The potential nationwide is estimated at 20 times that much power, equal to about 400 large coal or nuclear plants.

It is some consolation, as Yardley notes, that China is making a concerted effort to clean up its act.

"The rising controversy over the dam makes it easy to overlook what could have been listed as world record No. 11: The Three Gorges Dam is the world's biggest man-made producer of electricity from renewable energy."

Like many countries, China still is find its way.