Will China lead the global fight against climate change?

 

On September 22, Chinese President Xi Jinping announced to the world that China, responsible for 28 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, would phase out any conventional use of coal, oil, and gas to achieve the goal of “carbon neutrality”, i.e., zero additional carbon emissions into the atmosphere, by 2060.

Under the Paris climate deal reached in 2015, China had pledged that its emissions would peak ‘around 2030’, Xi addressing the United Nations General Assembly on September 22, said that he was moving up that timetable to ‘before 2030’.

If China is able to deliver on the climate neutrality pledge by mid-century, it will lower global warming projections by around 0.2 to 0.3 degrees Celsius, the single-biggest reduction measured since countries signed the Paris Agreement in 2015, according to an analysis by the Climate Action Tracker, which measures government commitments on climate against the Paris Agreement goals.

Carbon neutrality refers to the elimination of carbon dioxide emissions by stopping emissions altogether or by balancing carbon dioxide emissions with some form of carbon removal. It is important to note that carbon neutrality differs from climate neutrality because it does not consider other greenhouse gases.

More than 60 other countries have pledged carbon neutrality by 2050, a consensus deadline that scientists believe must be met to have a reasonable chance of averting the worst climate catastrophe. Those countries are small compared to China. China’s total emissions are about as much as those produced by the United States, European Union, and India combined.

Sceptics have been quick to point out that Xi’s announcement means China will have to stop burning coal, a tall order in a country that is home to half of the world’s coal power capacity and another 210GW to be added soon. Others have expressed concerns about China exporting emissions, as it is financing a quarter of coal plants under development in other countries through its Belt and Road Initiative, with 102GW capacity.

Then there is the timing of the announcement, before the US presidential elections, which could mean China is trying to get out in front of any US pressure in case Biden is sworn in, or maybe even yielding to bilateral pressure from European Union that has been threatening carbon taxes on imports from China if Beijing did not raise its ambition.

Yet there are reasons to believe that Beijing may have acted unconditionally, given that China outperformed its 2020 carbon emission target, reaching the goal three years ahead of schedule. There are strong indications that China could meet its 2030 carbon intensity peaking targets by 2025.

“China rarely makes announcements unless it is confident that it will move towards achieving them, the new pledge indicates that the government could be moving towards a commitment to phasing out the fossil fuel. ” said Bill Hare, CEO of Climate Analytics.

According to Harjeet Singh, global climate lead at Action Aid, “The fact is that even as it appears to cling to coal, China has also emerged as a leader in clean energy technologies, including solar panels and wind turbines. It is the world’s largest manufacturer of electric cars and buses...”

It is important to note that China’s efforts to cut emissions so far have been more about pragmatism than climate leadership. Pollution and other environmental threats are increasingly seen as threats to the communist party’s standing. “Humankind can no longer afford to ignore the repeated warnings of nature,” Xi told the General Assembly. That was evident in this summer’s devastating floods on the Yangtze River and its tributaries in central China.

Xi has already pledged to increase government support for new technologies while fighting pollution, protecting natural resources, and expanding the country’s national park networks.

However, if Xi is serious, then the ambitious target of climate neutrality must find space in the Chinese government’s soon-to-be released 14th Five-Year Plan (2021-2025), with detailing of the structural changes in energy production and consumption and long-term decarbonisation road maps that are economically and technically viable.

Whether Xi will save the world from runaway climate change or not remains to be seen, but the pressure is now on India, China’s partner-in-chief at the UNFCCC in resisting calls from the West for firm commitments to decarbonisation, to make a similarly bold climate announcement.

First published on Money Control on October 5, 2020.

Climate Change | Sorry Greta Thunberg, the world is not ready to tackle the climate crisis

The much-hyped United Nations Climate Action Summit in New York on September 23, starring UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, teen climate activist Greta Thunberg, and millions of children from around the world rallying for urgent and enhanced climate action, delivered near to nothing.
In 2015, governments pledged in the Paris Agreement to attempt to keep global warming since pre-industrial times to 1.5 degrees Celsius. This requires achieving net-zero global emissions by 2050. Science shows that phasing out coal, the most polluting fossil fuel, is essential to achieving that goal. This year, Guterres asked world leaders to come to the UN with concrete plans to cut emissions to net-zero.
Instead, rich countries and large emitters such as the United States, Australia, Saudi Arabia, and Brazil brazenly ignored Guterres’ call and skipped the summit, while others practically came empty-handed to the table. Chinese President Xi Jinping’, leader of the world’s largest emitting country, sent his envoy Wang Yi with nothing but a promise to meet its Paris pledge.
Even Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s promise of installing 450 GW after 2022 was received with scepticism given India’s continued dependence on coal-fired power plants. According to BP Energy Outlook 2019, coal’s share in India’s primary energy consumption will be almost half at 48 per cent in 2040, oil’s share will be 23 per cent, and the contribution of renewables will rise fivefold to a mere 16 per cent.
Worldwide, despite the extraordinary growth of renewable energy in the last decade, the share of coal-fired powered plants continues to dominate the global energy system.
According to a report by Climate Analytics, the current and planned coal power plants globally would lead to a generation increase of 3 per cent by 2030 compared to 2010 levels. If the world follows these present trends, this would lead to cumulative emissions from coal power generation almost four times larger than what would be compatible with the Paris Agreement by 2050.
Even if all the planned and announced coal power plants would be cancelled, shelved, or converted to other fuel, the operating coal plants would exceed the Paris Agreement benchmarks by four times in 2030 and more than 20 times by 2040, highlighting the huge risk of stranded assets that the coal sector will be facing in the next decades.
The UNEP Emissions Gap Reports, aka ‘where we are likely to be and where we need to be’, current Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) are estimated to lower global emissions in 2030 by up to 6 GtCO₂e (gigatonnes of equivalent carbon dioxide) compared to a continuation of current policies. This level of ambition needs to be increased around fivefold to align with the 1.5°C limit.
For now, levels of the main long-lived greenhouse gases, carbon dioxide (CO₂), methane (CH₄₎) and nitrous oxide (N₂O) have reached new highs. CO₂ emissions grew 2 per cent and reached a record high of 37 billion tonnes of CO₂ in 2018. There is still no sign of a peak in global emissions, even though they are growing slower than the global economy.
According to the UN’s Science Advisory Group, ‘the average global temperature for 2015–2019 is on track to be the warmest of any equivalent period on record’. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is of the view that ‘warming and changes in ocean chemistry are already disrupting species throughout the ocean food web, with impacts on marine ecosystems and people that depend on them.’ It also noted that ‘if current trends continue wildfires and heat waves would sweep across the planet annually, and the interplay between drought and flooding and temperature would mean that the world’s food supply would become dramatically less secure.
The IPCC’s Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5° clearly states that, “avoiding that scale of suffering, requires such a thorough transformation of the world’s economy, agriculture, and culture that “there is no documented historical precedent.”
Scientists believe that “this is not physically impossible” but as Thunberg and Guterres discovered, the world is nowhere near ready to tackle the climate crisis on the basis of science. Not yet.

First Published on Sep 26, 2019 in Moneycontrol