China Set for Coal Expansion in Threat to Climate Goals
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
https://www.carbonbrief.org/mapped-worlds-largest-co2-import...
"Despite the large total of CO2 imports and exports, US emissions are only 6% higher and Chinese emissions are 13% lower when CO2 transfers are taken into account."
Energy related carbon dioxide emissions peaked in 2007 in the United States [1]. They didn't just get hidden by imports replacing domestic manufacturing. Even incorporating imports into the national balance, US emissions are down from the peak. This is largely due to efficient combined cycle gas turbines replacing coal plants and -- to a lesser but growing extent -- a larger proportion of renewable electricity in the national electricity mix.
Chinese carbon dioxide emissions have not peaked yet. As of 2017 (referenced above), 87% of Chinese emissions are attributable to domestic consumption. That should moderate hopes that Chinese emission trends could be reversed by CO2 tariffs. It should also moderate anxiety that Chinese emissions are "really" the offshored emissions of Western consumers.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_gas_emissions_by_th...
I'm relatively hopeful that renewables will simply be cheaper though, in part thanks to China. But we could still use tariffs for global co-operation on other sources of emissions (there was a story recently about China releasing CFCs for example).
Unfortunately, China appears to have some historical inertia and perverse incentives to keep mining coal and building/running coal plants even if coal-fired electricity isn't the cheapest any more [1]. The incentives to keep running economically dubious coal plants to maintain employment can be very strong in some provinces, even if that conflicts with national goals for reducing air pollution. Mining coal and running coal plants requires more workers per megawatt hour than solar power. And even if they were equal, it's not like coal miners can painlessly make the transition to working in solar manufacturing or installation.
I have also read about situations where e.g. a province gets revenue for every ton of coal mined, but would not get any revenue for every hour of sunshine collected, so there are localized revenue reasons for provincial authorities to prefer coal.
[1] Like Germany, Australia, the US, Poland, South Africa... and more.
A sort of reparation or settlement for western carbon output in the 20th century, which the same impact on the climate only differing in happening earlier, would help developing nations get on board. This arrangement could take the form of investment in a developing nations clean energy infrastructure or compensation in other forms.
Otherwise, developing nations besides China will probably continue buying legacy, retired coal fire equipment from China, which has been happening for some time now.
But the hypocrisy argument fails anyway because the renewable alternatives that exist today didn't exist a hundred years ago. It's altogether different to choose coal when the science is less well understood and no viable alternatives are known to exist than to do so today when that is not the case.
There is also a difference in scale. There are more than four times as many people in the developing world as there are in the developed world. If they used the same amount per capita then they would release more carbon in 10 years than we did in 40. Even if the First World hadn't burned an ounce of coal, they still wouldn't be able to do what we actually did. But they also don't need to today.
And it would be easier to pass tariffs than convince the population of the First World to send their money overseas. This needs to happen right now, not after people argue about it for another twenty years.
By that measure, China emits about twice what the US does, 0.6 vs 0.3. However China has done about twice as well as the US has in reducing this number, which is why China is on track to meeting their Paris commitments and the US isn't.
Not letting China totally off the hook, just suggesting that there is an economic force driving them toward the bottom of the barrel for cheap energy. California gets up to 50% of its power from solar during midday, but it also does a lot of much higher margin work like software, design, skilled manufacturing, etc.
The world CO2 per GDP number is falling, which is a good sign:
Just a quick comparison of the share of industry in each region's GDP:
* China: 40% industry
* Japan: 30% industry
* EU: 25% industry
* USA: 19% industryIt's a false belief to assume these manufacturing processes would return to EU/USA should China increase their regulations. Instead, there would be other nations with lower regulations that these manufacturing processes would move to in order maintain a satisfactory profit.
This is why I said manufacturing would move to somewhere with fewer labor/environmental regulations. Things may cost more in the short-run, but that's just before some new, enticing land of opportunities pops up.
We should be tariffing nations who don’t live up to our human and environmental rights standards if we actually care about the issues. We should be forcing corporations to be ethical to do business here.
The drug dealer is taking advantage of existing social decay but not necessarily creating it; but some do (opioid epidemic for example).
Also, you have it backwards. CCP had the option to create an export-driven economy, as well as the option on how to power it. Nobody held a gun to their collective heads and said "You must produce cheap goods for western countries, and you must power your economy in the cheapest and most polluting way possible."
The Chinese government has a lot of agency, and a lot of culpability, in this.
What it does show is that China’s CO2 use is mainly industrial while in America it is much more personal
No, but experience has shown that that is the surest path to economic development - probably the only viable path for a country the size of China. A small city state might be able to develop by establishing itself as a financial or shipping hub, but for a giant country of 1.4 billion people to go from utter poverty to wealth, there's a good argument that it first has to turn itself into the world's factory.
https://www.carbonbrief.org/mapped-worlds-largest-co2-import...
Apparently, the central government turned over permitting to provincial governments in 2014, leading to a massive surge in permits for coal plants, peaking in 2015 (see Fig. 3). Provincial governments wanted to promote growth above all else, so they went for coal. The central government was apparently alarmed by this, and imposed restrictions in 2016, leading new permits issued per year to drop by 80%. However, the new plants that were approved from 2014-2016 are still in the pipeline, which is why there are still new plants being built. The central government has slowed their construction and has proposed withdrawing a large fraction of the permits (for example, 150 GW of permits were canceled in 2018-19, while 8.5 GW of new construction was approved - see Table 4).
But just as in the West, there's a powerful coal lobby in China, which is pushing for already permitted projects to go ahead, for restrictions on new permits for coal plants to be lifted, and for the overall cap the government has set (1.1 TW) to be increased. Playing into all of this is the general economic slowdown in China, which of course puts pressure on the government to ease restrictions.
Despite all this, the trend in China is for less coal capacity to actually come online each year (Fig. 4). The question is really whether it will fall fast enough (Fig. 5).
1. https://endcoal.org/global-coal-plant-tracker/reports/out-of...
The global economy needs China to keep on growing. Germany, arguably the most important economy in the world outside of China, India and the US is nearing recessions because of slowing Chinese consumer spending. A recession in the EU spells disaster for the rest of the world.
It's difficult to expect China to curb it's growth for the common good when more advanced economies ignored the science for decades (ie. at least since the 70S) to favor its own growth.
*(I'm not sure if this is on a "spot" basis or annualised to account for intermittency, but then it probably doesn't account for the negative externalities of coal either so let's chalk it up to a draw.)
Bullshit. Not at the scale they need. Solar might be "cheaper" in very confined, specific contexts. But China needs on-demand capacity for a billion people. Renewables + batteries cannot accomplish this.
Plus, solar is cheap partially because you don't need to source that much of it. Try to source that much solar and see what happens to the price.
Besides the destruction of our planet. They must be stopped, even if it means tanking the world economy. One of my dissapointments in things like the Green New Deal is that it ignores international trade. We should ban Chinese trade until they align with climate goals.
How about the 10's of millions of their citizens being poisoned or dying from pollution related illnesses?
>The global economy needs China to keep on growing.
They run trade imbalances with almost the entire world. The Chinese are not the best consumers.
>Germany, arguably the most important economy in the world outside of China, India and the US is nearing recessions because of slowing Chinese consumer spending.
Huh?
>It's difficult to expect China to curb it's growth for the common good when more advanced economies ignored the science for decades
How is China not a 1st world nation? Or not an advance economy?
Their per capita income is 15% of Americans'?
The other 1/3rd live what are essentially first world lifestyles.
Whether or not you think China is a 1st world nation, a great deal of political logic in China evokes a historical animosity towards Western nations for actions during the Chinese "Century of Shame". China has certainly caught up in many ways but is still developing, and the biggest leaps in development are still only a generation or two deep.
Before you saying this, please update your source. Sorry, India is the most polluted country, and China is much better than lots of Asia countries, dear!
The CCP didn’t blink when tens of millions died in a famine they created. They will sacrifice any number to maintain their regime.
How about the world not ending?
That might be a more compelling argument.
The Party survived inflicting famine on its own people killing tens of millions. It is confident of surviving an ecological catastrophe and ruling over whatever’s left.
[citation needed]. China is on its last legs of growth. It's doing an exact repeat of what Japan did that led to their "lost decade". Either there will be a hard correction or well over a decade of no or little growth. Every year the growth rate has been going down. It's now estimated for less than 6% growth for 2019.
> Michael R. Bloomberg, the founder and majority stakeholder of Bloomberg LP, the parent company of Bloomberg News, has committed $500 million to launch Beyond Carbon, a campaign aimed at closing the remaining coal-powered plants in the U.S. by 2030 and slowing the construction of new gas plants.
this kind of thing makes the reporting feel questionable. A shame because the message is really important.
They'll also cut CO2 emissions as a side effect of an attempt to corner the market on green technologies.
Here is the summary that I posted on my blog:
https://paraditedc.com/2019/11/22/pdc-10-chinas-real-progres...
China has 43 GW of nuclear built, 11 GW in construction, and another 36 GW planned. I guess it's not a huge figure compared to 148.
Domestically
1. Perverse incentives in some provinces still reward coal production.
2. Diminishing incentives for solar and other renewable.
3. Pivot to interior development of interior regions, bureaucrats are adopting the same building + smoke stack strategies that worked on coastal cities. There's was some internal response - many of the proposed coal plants are being eliminated.
4. Keep in mind China is still at 60% urbanization rate. A lot of construction related CO2 is basically for modern housing stock - commonly referred to as "ghost cities" - but they get occupied eventually.
5. Renewable is still central to domestic energy security in response to US security competition. Previously, renewable was a response to air quality complaints, now it has to be balanced with security.
US-SINO trade war
5. Increased pressure for Chinese energy security - China has access to essentially infinite amount of domestic coal. Now that US seems to be withdrawing from Gulf security because US is energy independent from shale, there's more urgency in China to build up coal security at least short term.
6. Reliance on construction to maintain growth. Related to 3&4.
7. Related to #3, economic pressures from trade war might motivate more coal plants to be built. There was also a resurgence in shadow banking after deleveraging campaign was cut short due to trade war.
Globally
8. Exporting infrastructure capacity means more coal plants along Belt & Road.
I'm of mixed feelings, cheap goal -> development. Eliminating poverty and development is more pressing than climate change. There isn't a climate change strategy that can handle uplifting the developing world into developed status. I think that's like 3/4 of the world. Doesn't mean we shouldn't do everything in the mean time to figure out how to mitigate, but ethically we should be working towards an end goal of X universal consumption baseline. X being much higher than global average now and probably much lower than western levels. If that's beyond global carrying capacity then I guess WW3.
E: typos
(also to India and other countries)
And I find this troubling. On what moral authority the west think it is ok to kick the ladder?
Climate change is a problem, and we have to deal with it, but the west blaming India and China when the US has the largest emission per capita by a mile and more is not going to get us anywhere.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trade-india-wto/india...
What I think is often missing though is considering how we are contributing to the co2 output of those developing countries. A big share of their power demands is through production of goods for pretty much the rest of the world. It really grinds my gears how so many people suggest we can completely ignore that we are creating that demand in the first place, exploiting cheap production costs in China, which is in part because regulations regarding pollution are so lax over there, while at the same time patting ourselves on the back for reducing co2 output here, when you really just move more and more production to other counties.
And I don't have a good idea how to fix this either. Clearly, consumers don't care enough to vote with their money, or pressure local politicians. But turning a blind eye on our contribution entirely and conveniently pointing out how China is so horrible and we're so great isn't going to fix anything either.
Most of the West doesn't think it is OK to kick the ladder. That's why the Paris agreement included the developed countries providing a lot of aid to countries like India to help them meet climate goals without having to give up on development.
[1]https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-10-04/the-big-h...
[2]https://www.forbes.com/sites/dominicdudley/2019/01/11/china-...
China is simultaneously expanding its use of electricity from coal, renewables, and nuclear plants faster than any other country in the world. This is because China is the world's largest consumer of electricity and is still growing.
[1] https://www.bp.com/content/dam/bp/business-sites/en/global/c...
1. Ban all air travel 2. Ban all consumer goods made in developing nations. (a large contributor to China and India's carbon footprint) 3. War with countries producing a large carbon foot print if they refuse diplomatic efforts to meaningfully curb emissions. 4. Eat only plants and insects. 5. No cars (battery or otherwise). 6. Culling or otherwise slowing the population.
If one is not willing to adopt all of these (and more unmentioned) as part of their own lifestyle and political views one does not truly believe climate change poses as great a danger as it is made out to be.
In fact, it is proof there is a particular political end in mind and climate change is a convenient excuse for those in power to meet their own political ends.
This is going to be the most cynical possible of takes, but I just don't see how this is politically viable in a place like the United States. The government is gridlocked and will likely remain so for the foreseeable future. Furthermore, the United States military is a massive CO2 emitter, so this would likely drive the dual deficits into even more dangerous territory because, let's face it, we're not going to demilitarize in any meaningful way.
What is done with the revenue from the carbon tax? That's up to the policy, it could be revenue neutral w/ a progressive rebate that helps the poor, or the revenue could be used to support EV chargers, renewables, efficiency upgrades, it's all up to the policy makers. In WA, USA, they tried to pass a carbon tax, but it failed because some moderates/GOP wanted revenue neutral w/ taxpayer rebates, whereas the left wanted climate equity and green-new-deal-type policies. So, there is real, carbon-tax-killing debate over what to do with revenues.
It is of course easy to tweak them to make them even better, like directing some of the money to subsidize public transport.
I think the basic intuition is that to make luxury product X involves lots of poor people using carbon. If you only count the direct expenditures then it looks worse for poor people, if you trace each purchase back to its carbon then it affects the people who buy lots of stuff.