According to an Associated Press video, President Biden accused China of “not showing up” at the COP26 Climate Summit in December 2021 despite wanting to be a world leader. “It just is a gigantic issue and they walked away. How do you do that and claim to be able to have any leadership?” Biden said. “It’s been a big mistake, quite frankly, for China not showing up. The rest of the world looked at China and said ‘What value are they providing?’” [1] A wide swath of western media echoed Biden’s rhetoric. This was in spite of the Chinese delegation, led by Zhang Jun, the senior envoy to the United Nations, was present in the Climate Summit from day one.
This is not an isolated incident. From social media to global leaders, pointing fingers at China has become routine when discussing climate actions. This is not surprising because China currently releases more carbon dioxide than any other country—nearly 30% of the world’s total emissions—leading many to believe it bears the greatest responsibility for climate change. However, the situation is more complex than it seems. Usually, when a country’s carbon emissions are calculated, only carbon emitted within that country is counted. But if we wanted to consider which countries are responsible for how much of the warming, a calculation of the accumulated emissions since the industrial revolution makes more sense. The figure below shows that U.S.’s cumulative emissions far exceed that of China’s and is over 25% of the world’s total cumulative emission since 1750.
Moreover, when countries are ranked by per capita emissions, China is way down the list, according to the DW.com figure below. In terms of per capita emission, at 16.1 metric tons per person, U.S. is significantly above the global average of 4.8 tons per capita. China, on the other hand, generates 7.1 tons per person and is 48th among the world.
In addition, much of China’s emissions are driven by the rest of the world’s hunger for goods, as nearly the whole world relies on China for manufacturing. A 2014 MIT study found that approximately 22% of China’s carbon dioxide emissions were the result of net exports. Reducing this part of emissions would have no significant impact on total global emissions. This is because reduced production in China would need to be offset by increased production elsewhere. Steel production, for example, accounts for about 10% of China’s carbon emissions, while half of the world’s steel supply is manufactured in China. [2]
At COP 26, President Biden implied that China is shirking its climate change responsibilities. This is in direct contrast to a 2020 Foreign Affairs article that opens with “China has never been the most enthusiastic party to international climate accords, but Beijing might end up saving the planet anyway. In little more than a decade, China has made itself a world leader in electric vehicles, renewable energy, and energy storage.” [3]
So what has China specifically done to fight climate change?
Fighting climate change China’s way
China is simultaneously the world’s largest consumer of fossil fuels and the largest producer of renewable energy. With the pledge for carbon neutrality by 2060, China has a plan for meeting this goal. With its whole-cloth approach, China is currently expanding the use of electricity wherever possible. For example, China is rapidly switching to electric vehicles (EVs) and electric buses and was the world’s largest market for EVs and electric buses in 2021. There are already over one million charging stations to support these plug-in vehicles, while the U.S., which has similar geographic extent and similar number of automobiles as China, has about 120,000. China is also building massive capacity of renewable energy such as solar, wind, and hydro and the capacity to transmit power from areas rich in renewable resources in the north and west to the high demand areas of the east and south. The Guardian reported in 2021 that “China built more new windfarm capacity in 2020 than the [rest of the] world combined in the year before.” [4] The figure below shows China’s manufacturing capacity and its growth for renewable energy equipment.
To stabilize the uncertainties inherent in renewable energy sources, 150 new nuclear reactors are being planned, representing more reactors than the rest of the world has built over the past 35 years. All these actions will allow China to draw down the reliance on coal over time.
Aviation and shipping will need to continue to rely on fossil fuels into the foreseeable future. China is expanding its capacity for capturing and storing carbon dioxide released from burning fossil fuels or biomass and storing it underground, known as carbon capture and storage (CCS). In the meantime, a carbon market was established in 2021 to make CCS economically viable. Forests play an important role as biological CSS (i.e., carbon sequestration). Since 1978, forest coverage in China has increased from 12% to 22%, making China a world leader in converting bare land into forests. As part of the commitment to reaching net-zero carbon by 2060, China has planned to plant 36,000 sq. km. (nearly 9 million acres, larger than the size of Belgium) of new forest each year from 2021 to 2025.
Making these efforts possible is China’s investment in renewable energy. China has been the world’s leading investor in renewable energy since 2010. According to a UN Environment Programme report, ‘Global Trends in Renewable Energy Investment 2019,’ between 2010 and 2019, China invested $758 billion USD, with the U.S. second on $356 billion, and Japan third on $202 billion. Europe as a whole invested $698 billion. [5]
The country’s effort in fighting climate change also enjoys widespread public support. Surveys in 2017 showed that 94% of respondents agree that climate change is happening (top figure), and 66% believe it is mostly caused by human activities, according to the London-based ChinaDialogue.net. [6]
China’s 2021 energy report card
According to an article from Chinadiaglogue.net “[Chinese] President Xi Jinping’s carbon neutrality pledge at the United Nations in September 2020 set in motion a massive build-up of national policy, legislation and regulation on decarbonization, with unprecedented speed. Barely two months later, Xi announced a set of ambitious 2030 targets at the Climate Ambition Summit. Then, in March 2021, China’s top legislators approved the 14th Five Year Plan with a whole host of climate and energy targets for 2025 [summarized in the figure below].” These climate and energy goals are modest and achievable. [7]
2021 is the first year that China committed to peak carbon by 2030 and neutrality by 2060. China’s carbon report card for 2021 only shows modest reduction in carbon intensity. Unfortunately, with the economy recovering from the COVID pandemic, coal consumption reached a new high. However, the deployment of new renewable energy shows promise. The latest figures, from China’s National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), show 46.95 gigawatts (GW) of new wind power and 53.13 GW of new solar over the year—a 26.6% and 30.1% increase, respectively. China now has over 300 GW of both solar and wind power generating capacity. NBS data shows that China manufactured 3.545 million EVs in 2021, and 3.521 million were sold, a 60% increase on 2020.
How did China do all this? China’s commanding lead in renewable energy should not come as a surprise. Several factors have contributed to this success. First and foremost is government investment, for example, in constructing long-distance ultra-high voltage (UHV) lines connecting renewable resources to high-demand areas. Second is government policies that create demand, like requiring EVs to make up 40% of all sales by 2030. Low labor costs and openness to foreign manufacturing companies are also key. All these factors have created a market for renewable-energy innovations and productions. Furthermore, over half of China’s oil and gas relies on imports. China’s strategy to decarbonize is not only a response to the public’s demand for cleaner air or concern for climate change, but also driven by its concern for energy security. Thus renewable energy in not a choice, but a necessity.
Closing thoughts
There are major challenges ahead for China’s carbon neutrality goal. First, China’s aspiration of doubling its current per capita GDP of about 10,000 USD in 30 years means that energy demands will continue to rise. (As a reference, the U.S. per capita GDP is about 60,000 USD, and EU and Korea about 30,000 USD.)
Second, China still operates by far the largest number of coal power plants. To meet rising energy demands, China has planned to continue to add coal power plants even as renewable-energy output is rising rapidly. Thus there has been a relative, but not absolute, decline of coal power in the generation mix. The country’s carbon emissions are still extremely high and need to be sharply and quickly reduced across all economic sectors. The decarbonization rate in China needs to at least double to allow the country to reach the committed peak carbon and neutrality timelines.
There is a bright side: an often overlooked contribution by China toward fighting climate change is the country’s manufacturing and construction prowess in everything about renewable energy—in EVs, batteries, and in solar, wind, and UHV equipment. China has fundamentally altered the economics of clean energy production, thereby allowing countries, including developing countries, to make the transition to renewable energy. For example, as reported by Scientific American in 2016, between 2008 and 2013, China’s fledgling solar-electric panel industry dropped world prices by 80%. [8] Developing countries like India and Vietnam are now major buyers of Chinese solar equipment.
If U.S. policymakers discount and even sanction China’s renewable technology as they currently do, due to U.S-China trade conflicts, the world will not be able to fully take advantage of China’s renewable products, causing a collateral damage for the entire world.
References:
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJYNT2A5C2Q
[2] https://news.mit.edu/2014/calculating-chinas-carbon-emissions-from-trade.
[3] https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/china/2020-02-28/how-china-became-worlds-leader-green-energy
[5] https://wedocs.unep.org/handle/20.500.11822/29752
[6] https://chinadialogue.net/en/climate/10831-does-the-chinese-public-care-about-climate-change/
[8] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-china-is-dominating-the-solar-industry/