BEIJING — Having covered China's stance on global warming since 1988, I've gotten attuned to the need to tread carefully when something is said that feels like a shift in the official position of this greenhouse gas giant.
The ancient Chinese mask-changing dance that I saw here Tuesday night (at a dinner for participants in a meeting on science and sustainable development) came to mind in considering the unraveling of news a few hours earlier of an official Chinese plan for a firm cap on emissions of carbon dioxide, hard on the heels of President Obama's proposed carbon pollution rules for existing American power plants.
Here's how things played out. An adviser to the Chinese government on climate change was quoted by Reuters as saying the following at a Beijing climate-policy conference on Tuesday:
The government will use two ways to control CO2 emissions in the next five-year plan, by intensity and an absolute cap.
The comment came from He Jiankun, a professor at Tsinghua University and deputy director of China's Expert Committee on Climate Change, speaking at an international forum on market mechanisms for low-carbon development sponsored by Tsinghua and Harvard University.
The story quickly pivoted to how significant this would be given the context of President Obama's move and informal climate talks starting on Wednesday in Bonn, Germany, aimed at setting the stage for fresh climate treaty work later this year at the United Nations and in Lima, Peru.
The Guardian quickly followed Reuters with "China pledges to limit carbon emissions for first time," a piece canvassing climate campaigners but offering no reinforcing input from the Chinese government.
I consulted with The Times's Beijng bureau. Christopher Buckley, a reporter [based in Hong Kong] who in 2011 had covered China's emissions plans [and similar pushes from advisers to adopt a cap] while with Reuters, spoke with He Jiankun, who told him repeatedly that he did not in any way speak for the government, or the full expert climate committee.
Here's Buckley's translation:
It's not the case that the Chinese government has made any decision. This is a suggestion from experts, because now they are exploring how emissions can be controlled in the 13th Five Year Plan…. This is a view of experts; that's not saying it's the government's. I'm not a government official and I don't represent the government.
A Reuters reporter told me tonight that a correction was being posted [it's here], but not before other newspapers – including USA Today with a piece on China's "emissions pledge" – built on the report.
Other, more recent news coverage has reflected that this isn't China's position, although many experts in Beijing (including at the meeting I'm participating in) foresee an eventual cap and a peak in China's emissions sometime after 2030.
Here's more from other news outlets. The China News Service, a state-run news agency, also reported on the comments made by Professor He at the Tsinghua-Harvard forum but made no mention of proposals for a quantitative cap on carbon dioxide emissions.
The Financial Times posted "China climate adviser urges emissions cap."
Recalling that all energy forecasts need to be treated with a healthy dose of skepticism, best guesses for a peak in China's greenhouse gas emissions tend to center on the 2030s, as reflected in this paper earlier this year in the journal Energy Policy: "Peak energy consumption and CO2 emissions in China."
Here's the abstract:
China is in the processes of rapid industrialization and urbanization. Based on the Kaya identity [a formula drawing on economic activity, energy use and other factors to determine a country's greenhouse-gas impact], this paper proposes an analytical framework for various energy scenarios that explicitly simulates China׳s economic development, with a prospective consideration on the impacts of urbanization and income distribution. With the framework, China׳s 2050 energy consumption and associated CO2 reduction scenarios are constructed. Main findings are: (1) energy consumption will peak at 5200–5400 million tons coal equivalent (Mtce) in 2035–2040; (2) CO2 emissions will peak at 9200–9400milliontons (Mt) in 2030–2035, whilst it can be potentially reduced by 200–300Mt; (3) China׳s per capita energy consumption and per capita CO2 emission are projected to peak at 4tce and 6.8t respectively in 2020–2030, soon after China steps into the high income group.
Things could potentially speed up, as some have noted, but there are limits to the pace at which China can develop enough cleaner energy alternatives to cut back on coal burning. Professor He noted this in the Reuters article:
He said China's greenhouse gas emissions would only peak in 2030, at around 11 billion tonnes of CO2-equivalent. Its emissions currently stand at around 7-9.5 billion tonnes. But He said that would depend on China achieving a real reduction in coal consumption from sometime around 2020 or 2025, and on the nation meeting its target of having 150-200 gigawatts of nuclear power capacity by 2030. The share of non-fossil fuels in China's energy mix would reach 20 to 25 percent in 2030, He added.
Once an emissions peak and rough timeline are clearer, you can be sure a cap will be announced — but only when the trajectories are already in place to make it a sure bet.
We're already locked in for substantial human-driven climate change, but the intensifying focus on a post-fossil future in both China and the United States points to a real prospect that much of the world's remaining coal will stay in the ground in the end.
Addendum | To get a clearer view of China's stance on who needs to do what, and when, on CO2 emissions, click back to my interview last fall with Zou Ji, the deputy director of China's National Center for Climate Change Strategy:
Related coverage: Christina Nunez for National Geographic, Brad Plumer on Vox, Andrew Freedman on Mashable.
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