China’s CO2 Peak Could be Reached Much Sooner

Posted by on Nov 19, 2014 in Blog | 0 comments

An earlier post on the recently signed China-US climate change agreement cited a 2011 Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory study that predicted China’s CO2 emissions would peak in 2030 which coincided with China’s pledge.  However, MIT-Tsinghua researchers suggest the peak period could be moved forward by as many as 5 years given China’s slowing economy and the country’s many pollution-fighting policies.  I would add the transition to domestic consumption, the requisite changes in industrial structure, reducing heavy polluting industries such as iron and steel and cement, as well as moving up the economic and financial ladder generally also contribute to reductions in CO2.  Changes in life-styles and attitudes, especially among the next generation of consumers, make it all the more conducive.

 

As recently as 2010, when China’s economy was still growing at more than 10 percent a year, it was unclear when its emissions might peak, says Valerie Karplus, a professor of global economics at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, and director of the Tsinghua-MIT China Energy and Climate Project.

But economic growth has slowed (it was 7.7 percent in 2012), and in turn so has growth in demand for energy. Also, this year China’s government has already announced a plan to reduce air pollution by taxing and limiting coal use. Beyond that, carbon trading systems are now being tested in five cities and two provinces, and a national system is expected to come online in 2016.

But, says Karplus, there is still uncertainty over when China will begin actually reduce its emissions, and by how much. “It makes a big difference whether it peaks at 10 billion, 11 billion, or 15 billion metric tons of CO2,” and whether or not the trajectory decreases rapidly after that peak, says Karplus. The (China-US climate change) pact is “hugely important” for global climate change policy efforts because China has finally agreed to a target related to “turning its emissions down in absolute value,” instead of just limiting the rate at which those emissions grow from year to year, says Michael Oppenheimer, a professor of geosciences and international affairs at Princeton University. The deal also has symbolic value, he says, since the world’s top two emitters have effectively circumvented the reigning geopolitical gridlock over international climate policy.

– MIT Technology Review