China is backpedaling on its massive push for the coal-to-gas switch after the move created gas shortages in the north that left people freezing in the cold snap, financial magazine Caixin reported on Thursday. The Chinese Ministry of Environmental Protection said on Monday in an urgent letter to 28 cities in the north that residents now could continue burning coal or firewood to keep themselves warm in the areas where the switch from coal to natural gas and electricity has not been completed, Caixin reports, despite the ban on coal. “It is not wrong for Beijing to push the coal-to-gas switch, but the process was a bit too fast and outpaced the market’s capacity,” Xu Bo, a researcher with CNPC’s Research Institute of Economics and Technology, told Reuters . So big has been the drive to switch from coal to gas, that China has been buying up liquefied natural […]