Orbital View: About That Coal

Turns out China was burning a lot more of it than everyone else thought.

The country has been burning up to 17 percent more coal a year than the government had previously disclosed, according to new data reported in The New York Times this week. China is already the world’s leading producer of greenhouse gases from coal, but this increase alone “is greater than the whole German economy emits annually from fossil fuels,” the Times explained. And it complicates that whole global warming thing.

Here, the Port of Qinhuangdao, China’s largest coal shipping facility:

Read more from The Atlantic:

• That Time Europe Air-Dropped Vaccine-Loaded Chicken Heads to Bait Rabid Foxes

• Why So Many Minority Millennials Can't Get Ahead

• What ISIS Really Wants

This article was originally published on The Atlantic.