This Reuters story is a good follow up to last week’s CP post, “China softens climate rhetoric, commits to emissions peak (again), shows flexibility on Western reductions“:
China will make “controlling greenhouse gas emissions” an important part of its development plans, the government said, as pressure on the world’s top emitter grows ahead of global talks on tackling climate change.
The broad intentions set down in a report from a cabinet meeting on Wednesday were made public as Beijing proceeds with negotiations seeking a new global pact to fight climate change.
The meeting, chaired by Premier Wen Jiabao, bluntly said global warming threatened China’s environmental and economic health, newspapers reported on Thursday.
Warning of worsening droughts and floods and melting glaciers, the meeting stressed the “urgency” of tackling climate change and called for domestic objectives to control greenhouse emissions, though it made no mention of emissions cuts.
“Make objectives for controlling greenhouse gas emissions and adapting to climate change an important basis for setting the medium and long-term development strategies and plans of government at every level,” the Xinhua news agency said in a summary of the cabinet meeting….
China’s climate change ambassador, Yu Qingtai, said recently that his country wanted to see output of carbon dioxide peak as soon as possible, a shift away from China’s right to pollute as it develops.
The cabinet warned baldly of dire consequences from warming.
“The large amount of greenhouse gases emitted through human activities is the main reason for global warming leading to extreme weather events,” the report on the meeting said. This, it said, was also “threatening the security of water supplies.”
And this Bloomberg story is a good follow up to “China begins transition to a clean-energy economy“:
Beijing, China’s second-largest city after Shanghai by population size, plans to triple the use of renewable energy including wind power by 2010 from 2005 to help fight pollution and climate change.
Renewable energy will account for 4 percent of the city’s total consumption by next year and 6 percent by 2020, the Beijing Municipal Development and Reform Commission said in a statement handed out to reporters at a briefing today.
China plans to invest at least 100 billion yuan ($14.6 billion) to more than double its wind-power capacity by 2010 from last year. Beijing, whose population exceeds 17 million, will boost the use of renewable energy to 2.6 million metric tons of coal equivalent by next year and 7.2 million tons by 2020, the city’s economic planning body said in the statement….
China aims to increase the use of natural gas to 10 percent of total energy consumption by 2020 from about 3 percent. The country also plans to boost its solar generation capacity to 10 gigawatts by 2020 from a previous target of 1.8 gigawatts.
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Previous in TP Climate Progress
It’s a hopeful sign that even as almost half of our own political leaders refuse to face up to the realities of Climate Change, that the leaders in the rest of the world, seem to getting it. Unlike the U.S., they are refusing to allow political philosophies of convenience to dictate their science-based decisions and policy-making.
The U.S. may be the biggest GHG emitter on a per-person basis, but we are still only 300 million people out of 7 billion. While it is a pitiful indictment of our country that we are no longer forward-looking and so cannot lead on this critical issue, the rest of the world seems to have accepted that fact and intends to go forward without us.
Say goodnight, America.
Lets hope America will act responsibly in its decline. The current Town Hall behavior is a bad sign though.
“China’s climate change ambassador, Yu Qingtai, said recently that his country wanted to see output of carbon dioxide peak as soon as possible, a shift away from China’s right to pollute as it develops.”
But he also said that 2035 is as soon as possible. Assuming a symmetrical curve, with the decline after 2035 as rapid as the growth before 2035, it will take them until 2061 to get back down to their current level of emissions. And that symmetrical curve is an optimistic assumption: given their economic growth, it is doubtful that they can decrease emissions as rapidly as they increased them.
Also, projecting its recent growth rate, China’s economy will have grown roughly eight-fold by 2035. By 2035, China will be fully developed, so it is not actually abandoning the idea that it has a right to increase emissions as it develops.
[JR: Don't mistake Chinese public statements for what they think is possible or likely. I'll bet you China peaks by 2025. Also, not gonna be symmetrical.]