China is on track to beat its peak-emissions pledge | Hacker News Reader

China is on track to beat its peak-emissions pledge

arstechnica.com

I've lived there and can say from experience China just makes stuff up. The local governments are responsible for reporting to higher ups and they don't want to miss targets, so they straight up lie. In reality it's a house of cards. You can lie about a 2% change once, and twice, and three times, but soon your lies compound and it's clear you didn't reduce emissions by the rate you reported. Only time will prove me correct about this. They do this with air quality regularly. Chinese official numbers of PM2.5 are regularly 30-50% lower than what the US embassy reports.

I don’t know why you’re getting downvoted on this, it’s a common problem in authoritarian governments of all stripes. Nobody gets promoted from Apparatchik to Senior Apparatchik by pushing back on the quotas set for them.

I'd like to be proven wrong here but I tend to suspect them of fudging their numbers, so to speak. There is a lot of corruption at the municipal level and there is incentive for local officials to overstate their progress.

That said, pollution is pretty serious in their bigger cities so I hope for everyone's sake the numbers are true.

I think China is doing more for renewable energy than any other country combined. Bar maybe India.

They are building solar panel, wind turbines at a frantic pace, pushing really hard for electrification because of said pollution.

Yes they are still building new coal stations, yes atrocious things are happening there, but renewable energy? China is the reason it's so cheap

This is a one-sided hot-take. China is not the only reason it's so cheap. If you look at the history of solar and wind energy, the USA and Europe were absolutely crucial in innovation and cost cutting for the first few doublings of production. For instance, Germany was the biggest early-adopter of solar. Furthermore, the US has time and again been the innovators on the research-front, though we are ceding that ground more and more to EU and China today.

China has done some things very well, namely scaling up production massively and incentivizing via govt programs, both of which the USA has struggled to do. To say China is the only reason, that just ignores history.

The fact remains that currently, china is investing more in renewables than the rest of the world combined.

You are right, Europe and US pioneered the industry, but that makes the fact that they are currently fiddling while Rome burns even more damning.

I think number fudging goes on all the time, China probably a little bit worse, but then in the end the number has to come from somewhere. It's easy to fudge a single year worth of data but then it gets progressively harder. So while we should take all numbers with a grain of salt, the long term number will eventually reflect reality.

Those pm2.5 number can be easily verified by others,just googled on pm2.5 sensors and they cost like 20~50 euros. So i image there's probably a whole community of pollution watchers in China given the health risks associated with air pollution. And the local governments probably don't want more green protests marches.

This hilariously overstates how incentivized individual citizens are to protest, when I would expect the exact opposite given how the Chinese state operates.

Individual citizens aren't incentivized to lead a protest (because that will get them arrested), but they're incentivized to participate in a protest while avoiding arrest, because that's usually effective to extract concessions from the government who want to avoid a repeat of the Tiananmen protests.

E.g. most recently in Wuhan against a trash incinerator plant too close to a residential area: "At first the Xinzhou district government attempted to calm the unrest. It issued a statement last Wednesday denying that work had started on the incinerator. It said the project hadn't even been registered, nor had it gone through any environmental assessment." https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-china-blog-48904350

Is it easy to fake the numbers this days where you can automate a lot of the measurements?

Well, it depends on who's making the measurements. How easy is it to actually measure China's emissions by a neutral third party?

With the proposed new set of EU's Sentinel satellites hopefully to be launched in the coming years, it should be trivial. That is, if the proposed mission actually happens.

Yes, you just put a fan in front of your pollution sensors.

I think satellites are used this days, balloons too

AQI is taken by fixed sensor stations, you can even get a map of them per Chinese city (along with individual readings for more localized AQI measurements). So a few Hebei officials were scamming the system by filtering the air directly around the sensor stations. Beijing was not amused.

What a bizarrely upbeat article. China’s CO2 output will supposedly peak at 10 tons per person for $21,000 GDP per capita. Using the article’s numbers, The US achieves triple the GDP per capita with just 60% higher CO2 emissions. Note also that China’s population will peak and then start declining in just a few years, which has a lot to do with why CO2 output will peak: https://www.google.com/amp/s/mobile.reuters.com/article/amp/.... The only reason US CO2 output didn’t peak decades ago is that the US population continues to grow steadily.

> The US achieves triple the GDP per capita with just 60% higher CO2 emissions.

The paper is based on the environmental Kuznets curve model [1], according to which growth in GDP per capita eventually allows more environmentally friendly policies to be implemented, causing pollution per unit of GDP to shrink again. That's exactly the effect that allows the US to generate a higher GDP with comparatively smaller increases in CO2 emissions. The paper uses the fact that some countries are farther along the curve than others to empirically fit the parameters and uses that to estimate when CO2 emissions per capita will peak given current economic development.

Note that that's just about the per-capita measures; the expected peak in population compounds the effect.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuznets_curve#Environmental_Ku...

You need to look at the trends. For many decades China built up fossil fuel production and use as fast as possible, and didn't give a damn about the environmental consequences.

But then about a decade ago, the government suddenly realized it needed to get off fossil fuels, for a whole series of reasons (one of them being that, unlike American conservatives, Chinese governmental officials actually believe what their scientists tell them).

So China has been busy turning around the huge ocean liner of its economy as fast as it can, and the result is a great improvement in the first and second derivative of fossil fuels pollution (though a recent slowdown in the economy has also helped here).

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