Guest essay by Eric Worrall
A new study suggests China’s shift from heavy industry to a high tech service economy will cause CO2 emissions to peak well before the 2030 goal – though the study authors admit they haven’t considered smaller cities.
China is on track to meet its climate change goals nine years early
ENVIRONMENT 26 July 2019
By Adam Vaughan
…Now an analysis has found that China’s emissions could peak at 13 to 16 gigatonnes of CO2 between 2021 and 2025, making what the researchers call a “a great contribution” to meeting the Paris deal’s goal of limiting temperature rises to 2°C. The official target is a peak by “around 2030.”
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However, Haikun and colleagues admit they didn’t analyse many small cities, which have the potential to develop more, so the real emissions may end up higher. The US-based thinktank World Resources Institute also says that while more countries are peaking emissions – 57 are due by 2030, up from 19 in 1990 – it will still not be enough to make global emissions peak in the next few years.
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Read more: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2211366-china-is-on-track-to-meet-its-climate-change-goals-nine-years-early/
The abstract of the study;
China’s CO2 peak before 2030 implied from characteristics and growth of cities
Haikun Wang, Xi Lu, Yu Deng, Yaoguang Sun, Chris P. Nielsen, Yifan Liu, Ge Zhu, Maoliang Bu, Jun Bi & Michael B. McElroyChina pledges to peak CO2 emissions by 2030 or sooner under the Paris Agreement to limit global warming to 2 °C or less by the end of the century. By examining CO2 emissions from 50 Chinese cities over the period 2000–2016, we found a close relationship between per capita emissions and per capita gross domestic product (GDP) for individual cities, following the environmental Kuznets curve, despite diverse trajectories for CO2 emissions across the cities. Results show that carbon emissions peak for most cities at a per capita GDP (in 2011 purchasing power parity) of around US$21,000 (80% confidence interval: US$19,000 to 22,000). Applying a Monte Carlo approach to simulate the peak of per capita emissions using a Kuznets function based on China’s historical emissions, we project that emissions for China should peak at 13–16 GtCO2 yr−1 between 2021 and 2025, approximately 5–10 yr ahead of the current Paris target of 2030. We show that the challenges faced by individual types of Chinese cities in realizing low-carbon development differ significantly depending on economic structure, urban form and geographical location.
Read more: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-019-0339-6
I’m always a little dubious about analysis of China conducted by Chinese academics, particularly where a negative finding might cause embarrassment for the Chinese government.
The South China Post recently revealed massive fraud in reported economic growth in the city of Guanghan.
This isn’t the first time; fake reports of economic growth may even have been responsible for the myth of decoupling, a period several years ago when Chinese growth appeared to be surging despite a slump in the growth of reported Chinese CO2 emissions.
Then Chinese CO2 emissions suddenly surged; I still don’t know whether this was because actual economic growth started to catch up with reported growth, or maybe China decided to confess CO2 emissions they had previously been concealing.
Every country wants to exist on a service economy because it’s supposedly ‘Green’ and provides a higher standard/level of employment. It’s already been said…. someone has to make the world’s “stuff” and to think for a moment China is willing to give up being the industrial leader is fantasy.
I absolutely think China is willing to give up it’s status as the world’s manufacturer if it can can obtain similar status in the much more lucrative technology and energy fields. They’ll gladly shift their manufacturing capacity to southeast Asia, Mongolia, the -stans, and Africa if it means they get their own Silicon Valley. That’s one of the reasons behind their attempts to economically ‘colonize’ much of the third-world through their Belt-and-Road program. Just like America and Europe shipped out all their ‘dirty’ industries to China over the last 30 years, China is planning to ship them out to over the next 30 years to the third world. The difference is, they are planning to financially cripple those countries first, so that they will always get a piece of the pie in ‘tribute’ from their indebted manufacturing colonies.
You may be spot on but I don’t believe there’s enough available tech sector jobs to take the place of the manufacturing jobs that would be lost in China. They already own computer/phone/TV/digital manufacturing (after we handed it to them). That may be the plan but I think it will quickly morph into hoarding all jobs to meet their population growth needs. The sleeping dragon has awakened.
China has no population growth needs. In fact, they’ve got the opposite problem. Their population is shrinking rapidly, and unlike the west which uses immigration to bolster it’s population, the Chinese are insular and want no part of mass immigration. China will look to keep all the lucrative high-end manufacturing jobs for complex tech products, and ship out all the low-margin manufacturing for the cheap low-quality consumer products that Americans buy at Wal-Mart.
Say what? Steve, that’s not true at all.
China’s population is NOT “shrinking” as you claim.
w.
Sorry, I worded that poorly.
China is PROJECTED to have a shrinking population in the near future. It hasn’t quite happened yet.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/01/17/world/asia/china-population-crisis.html
they have peak workforce not peak population, in as much as you can define working age.
Steve July 31, 2019 at 6:09 pm
Nope. You made a false statement. You said
You made a false claim, not once but three separate times, and now you don’t have the albondigas to say “Oops, I was wrong”.
Pass … I can’t or perhaps won’t hold a discussion with a man who refuses to admit when he’s wrong three times and instead tries to cover it up by saying he “worded it poorly”.
w.
What is worse his filmsy evidence of a shrinking population still shows it increasing until 2030 and then supposedly slowly dropping off.
Eventually it will as numerous Girl Babies were outsourced so that families could have Boy babies to carry on the family name. Now the ration of Adult Boys to adult Girls is skewed and numerous Boys are without wives or opportunity for children.
China will meet its emission targets but only in models and western political statements, not reality.
Presumably the heavy industry will still need doing. Maybe the plan is that when we are sufficiently in debt to China they will force us to take up the heavy industry again while they do the high tech stuff and they truly will meet their emissions target.
China is right now moving industry from it’s large industrial cities to it’s “small” cities. Regions like Shanghai have closed industrial development and are truly moving to a service economy. A small city can be up to 10 million people, and have huge brand new industrial zones. If this study ignored small cities then they lost the forest looking at the trees the trees.
This is addition to them moving manufacturing to other countries.
You will find also China is moving some of it’s manufacturing to Africa. Africa has become China’s China with investment from China. Chinese invests more in Africa now more than any anywhere else.
This is hilarious. They’re cheering about a Paris Accord commitment to INCREASE emissions.
Meanwhile in India…..
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/india-expects-coal-fired-power-130601073.html
Quoting the Nature paper:
“This study was supported by the National Key R&D Program of China (2016YFA0600204), National Natural Science Foundation of China (NNSFC) (41371528, 71433007, 71690244), IGSNRR and Youth Innovation Promotion Association CAS (2019055) and the Harvard Global Institute of Harvard University.
and the authors’ affiliations:
“State Key Laboratory of Pollution Control and Resource Reuse, School of the Environment, Nanjing University, Nanjing, China
authors: Haikun Wang, Yaoguang Sun, Yifan Liu, Ge Zhu & Jun Bi
School of Environment and State Key Joint Laboratory of Environment Simulation and Pollution Control, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China
author: Xi Lu
State Environmental Protection Key Laboratory of Sources and Control of Air Pollution Complex, Beijing, China
author: Xi Lu
Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China
author: Yu Deng
School of Business and Hopkins-Nanjing Center, Nanjing University, Nanjing, China
author: Maoliang Bu
Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA
author: Michael B. McElroy
Contributions
H.W. conceived and led the research. H.W., X.L. and J.B. designed the paper. Y.S., Y.D. and H.W. calculated emissions. Y.L., G.Z. and M.B. performed emission trends analysis. H.W., X.L., Y.D. and C.P.N. interpreted the data. H.W., X.L., C.P.N. and M.B.M. drew conclusions and wrote the paper with input from all co-authors.
I would’ve added to “Contributions”:
C.P.N.and M.B.M. played the role of useful idiots for the Chinese climate propaganda machine.
Good news! The US will meet its Paris Climate goal – leaving the Paris Agreement right on time, which is this year – 2 years before China meets theirs. We win!
In general, CO2 emissions per capita tend to level out at about 5 – 15 tonnes per person once a country’s GDP/capita hits about $20K per person. That’s the Kuznets curve.
HOWEVER, China likely won’t hit $20K per person by 2030, AND with a huge population there’s a big difference between say 5 and 15 tonnes per capita emissions …
Finally, China’s population continues to expand. So the leveling off of the per capita emissions won’t stop emission growth.
Short answer? I can’t crank the numbers to get an emissions peak before 2030 despite trying lots of assumptions.
w.
Yes. I think it was Shellenberger who put the planned GDP growth against what they said they would do in terms of CO2 intensity per unit of GDP, and arrived at the estimate that they would come in higher than 15 billion tons in 2030.
The completely insane idea that getting that increase done earlier is a sign of meeting some kind of climate change reduction commitments?
Its insane. Its like applauding Stalin’s human rights record because he has managed to get more people than expected into the gulags faster.
Or applauding China’s commitment to privacy and diversity because their roll-out of surveillance is happening faster and more comprehensively than they had thought possible.
IIRC, the Chinese didn’t set any goals in Paris. And talking or France, 25/07/2019, Normandy, the worlds longest solar road-way has been declared an abject failure.
Road opens;
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/dec/22/solar-panel-road-tourouvre-au-perche-normandy
Road closes;
https://www.curbed.com/2019/7/25/8929870/france-solar-roadway-experiment-normandy
Anyone with an ounce of electrical engineering background could have told these people this would be the result.
Joke of the Day: China leading the way in the fight against climate change.
Please send them all your carbon credits for this exemplary behaviour.
“I’m always a little dubious about analysis of China conducted by Chinese academics, particularly where a negative finding might cause embarrassment for the Chinese government.
The South China Post recently revealed massive fraud in reported economic growth in the city of Guanghan.
This isn’t the first time; fake reports of economic growth may even have been responsible for the myth of decoupling, a period several years ago when Chinese growth appeared to be surging despite a slump in the growth of reported Chinese CO2 emissions.”
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Eric, you can always check CO2 production on different states by different states satellite observations :
https://www.google.com/search?q=studie+Chinese+CO2+production+satellite&oq=studie+Chinese+CO2+production+satellite+&aqs=chrome.
But think about what this is really saying!
The argument is that China is reaching its goals several years early. And what were those goals? How big were the Chines reductions expected to be, and how much sooner are they going to make them?
Guess what, they were not planning on reducing, they were planning on moving from 10 billion tons a year to around 15 billion in about 2030.
Now they are on track to get to that 15 billion tons five years earlier, by sometime between 2021-2025.
This, we are told, is the Chinese making more rapid progress than expected in doing their bit to tackle global warming. That’s right, the Chinese are tackling global warming by increasing their emissions, and the good news is, they are managing to increase them faster than anyone expected.
Its great news. Now if the rest of the world would only show the same dedication to tackling global warming, maybe we could double emissions by 2030. That would do it. i guess the US and UK had better think seriously about how to do this. it will take a radical approach. The only way that comes to mind is maybe if they strip mined huge amounts of coal and burned it in the open air? Or maybe if they could find some other way of generating humongous quantities of CO2 and releasing it into the atmosphere? We need a new Manhattan project to find new ways of generating CO2. We need to start NOW!
It won’t be easy to match the Chinese accomplishments. But the future of the planet and our children’s future is at stake. Buy more SUV’s, fly more, install more fossil fuel power stations. We can do it! China is showing us the way!
China is ecstatic to see Western Leftist governments waste $trillions on insane wind/solar mega projects and colossal alt-energy subsidies, which have tripled the cost of electricity in many countries. This reality has driven Western manufactures to move to China which has extremely cheap energy prices, low taxes and minimal government regulation compliance costs.
Phase II of China’s plan is for idiotic Leftist Western governments to rapidly increase wasteful spending on alt-en subsidies, carbon taxes, Green New Deal projects, Paris Accord idiocies, etc., by $100+ trillion over the next 10 years, while China quietly develops Thorium MSRs which will be commercially viable 2030.
When dirt cheap and unlimited LFTR energy is available at $0.03/kWh, while Western energy prices soar to $0.30+/kWh, a second tidal wave of Western manufacturing will flood into China to take advantage of the cheapest energy in the world…
It’ll be nearly impossible for Western economies to quickly move to LFTR power as Leftist hate nuclear power and even if some LFTRS are planned, they’ll take decades to build given all the Leftist protests and bureaucratic red tape that is required before even a shovel of dirt is dug on a new LFTR site…
The West has been totally screwed by lunatic Leftists…
Meeting goals with projections (emissions) based on inaccurate representations (reports) of estimates (economic growth) barely related to the projection. Sounds like a sound basis for world wide government?
Let’s assume that China does peak its use of fossil fuels by 2028 which is highly unlikely.
What happens then? Do they start closing down a trillion dollars of new coal plants, electrifying all their cars, trucks and aircraft, phase out gas heating and stop cows from farting?
Of course not, China is hell bent on replacing the US as the principle world economic power and is flexing its muscles in the South China Sea, the pacific and using its foreign aid to control third world countries.
It needs a strong expanding economy to do this and it is ludicrous to think they will do anything that will impede economic growth.
If the Chinese Communist Party rulers of China can disappear the head of Inter-Pol; I imagine it would not be hard to disappear a couple of Chinese academics for arriving at the “wrong” answers in a study. Incentives do work.
From the department you can’t make this crap up! Completely ridiculous by 2030 China will account for about 35-40% of world emissions (currently about 27% from memory). In their attempt to lift their population out of poverty, part of which involves building new coal fired power infrastructure to enable a larger demand from their manufacturing industries as more and more Western countries divest their industry in the sake of Climate change. I could bore with the figures however One only has to google China’s contribution to global Co2 emissions over the last 20 years to see the stupidity of this claim.
Only dodgy brothers dodgy figures could arrive at their conclusion.