Now that Donald Trump has pulled the USA out of the Paris Agreement more attention has been focused on China’s role in reducing carbon emissions (the title of a book of mine that has just been published). And it seems there is a good chance that China will be able to reduce its energy-related carbon emissions by as much as two-thirds by 2050. Given China’s apparently accelerating growth in output of carbon emissions, this does seem a strange conclusion to make. But only if we ignore recent trends and, perhaps most importantly the economic, industrial and political dynamics at play. Recent carbon trends suggest that China is stabilising its carbon emissions earlier than projected by the Chinese Government. Independent evaluation of the carbon output in 2014, 2015 and 2016 indicate that during these years carbon dioxide emissions were stable and not increasing. There are three factors behind this turnaround. First, economic growth is slowing. There are good reasons to suspect that this is part of a longer term trend, and growth is likely to fall further. Developing economies can see rapid increases in carbon emissions as they develop infrastructure eg roads, railways, bridges, buildings, that forms the basis of the economy. However as time goes on there is less return from these developments and they slow down. Second, again, as people accumulate facilities that we almost take for granted in the West, such as fridges or TVs, production of this equipment rapidly increases. Certainly there are still products where ownership is still much less than is the case in the West – motor vehicles is the most important item here for energy consumption, but still it is becoming the case that for many products the early growth has subsided down to production of replacements.
Dave Toke’s Blog 12th June 2017 read more »