China Rejects Accusations of Cooking the Books on Carbon Emissions

Essay by Eric Worrall

Apparently disappearing half of China’s emissions has a perfectly reasonable explanation – and Western nations should look at their own carbon accounting practices.

GT Voice: Western doubts about China’s carbon accounting untenable

By Global Times Published: May 26, 2026 11:58 PM

Despite China’s globally recognized investments and achievements in renewable energy development, skepticism about its climate actions remains a recurring topic of Western public opinion. This has less to do with genuine concern for climate governance than with the double standards applied by certain Western institutions.

China’s revised method for reporting carbon emissions may have erased half of the rise in levels over the past five years, the Financial Times reported on Tuesday, citing an analysis from the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA), a European think tank. The CREA claimed that “The change in the definition of carbon intensity has the effect of weakening China’s climate targets and introducing more uncertainty into tracking progress.”

Yet, the biased claim does not stand up to scrutiny. Without knowing China’s actual methodology of measuring carbon intensity, the think tank’s skepticism politicizes China’s climate efforts through ideological bias while turning a blind eye to the country’s substantial and tangible contributions to global decarbonization.

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What is truly revealing about the CREA analysis is the double standard that underpins Western skepticism. Updating carbon accounting calibrations and retrospectively revising historical data are accepted as professional practices in the West. According to the US Environmental Protection Agency, many emission and sink estimates in the Inventory of US Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Sinks are recalculated and revised each year as part of ongoing efforts to improve estimates through better methods and data, with the goal of enhancing inventory quality and reducing uncertainties. 

These practices have never drawn Western suspicion. Yet when China improves its statistical system, the same kind of move is deliberately misinterpreted as “data opacity” and “weakening targets.” This glaring double standard shows that certain Western institutions are less interested in the science of climate governance than in stigmatizing China.

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Read more: https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202605/1362011.shtml

I think China missed the whole point of carbon accounting adjustments.

While using accounting tricks to minimise reported carbon emissions might be an old game in the West, such as Australia’s controversial use of Kyoto agreement era carbon credits to bolster claimed Paris Agreement compliance, you’re not supposed to do it all at once.

If China had made multiple adjustments over a year or two, nobody would have noticed. But cutting claimed net carbon emissions by half in one hit, it just looks naughty.

I suspect what is really happening is China just doesn’t care anymore. I mean, I now believe Xi Jinping was a genuine green energy enthusiast. But after the battering China’s economy has received over the last decade, and the rising risk China is about to enter a new century of humiliation thanks to the CCP’s disastrous handling of China’s banking crisis and collapsing birth rate, China has bigger problems than worrying about whether Western bureaucrats complain about their carbon accounting practices.