{"id":32372,"date":"2014-10-08T09:40:00","date_gmt":"2014-10-08T09:40:00","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2020-05-14T18:44:51","modified_gmt":"2020-05-14T18:44:51","slug":"7372-pushing-china-to-peak-emissions-early-could-be-bad-for-climate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dialogue.earth\/en\/energy\/7372-pushing-china-to-peak-emissions-early-could-be-bad-for-climate\/","title":{"rendered":"Pushing China to peak emissions early could be bad for climate"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/span><\/p>\n

Pushing China to peak its greenhouse-gas emissions too soon could damage global efforts to tackle climate change by driving industry to less efficient countries, a Chinese climate economist has argued.<\/p>\n

Guan Dabo of the UK’s University of East Anglia told chinadialogue <\/em>that China’s experience serving as the factory of the world for two decades had meant “many mistakes and many gains”, which would be crucial for tackling rising emissions.<\/p>\n

“If any other country, say India, becomes China the second, then it will take maybe another 20 years to learn what China has already achieved,” said Guan, who has published a seven-year study of Chinese emissions patterns in the journal Nature Climate Change<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n

“I would say as long as emissions growth is slowing down, that is fine, rather than asking China to peak – because we want to end [carbon] leakage to other countries.”<\/p>\n

However, Guan, who is professor in climate change and international development at UEA, argued that an absolute cap on Chinese emissions would be necessary to get the country’s economy onto a more sustainable footing. He said he was “optimistic” about progress on this front at the UN climate-change conference in Paris next year, highlighting the possibility that China’s wealthiest places including Beijing and Shanghai would commit to regional caps.<\/p>\n

The country’s ongoing experiment in emissions trading, which involves preliminary emissions caps for seven regions, is likely to pave the way towards a system of absolute targets, he added.<\/p>\n

Guan’s research indicates that China’s current climate-change goals, which focus on intensity of emissions (carbon dioxide produced per unit of GDP) are failing to drive effective mitigation in the context of surging, heavy-industry led economic growth. <\/p>\n

This is because the country’s boom has boosted emissions-intensive activities like mining, metal smelting and coal-fired power generation, negating even impressive carbon-efficiency gains made during the same period, he argues. Inner Mongolia, for example, achieved a 159% efficiency improvement between 2002 and 2009. But a 14-fold jump in cement production and metal smelting left it with a net efficiency gain of just 18%.<\/p>\n

On a national level, China’s carbon intensity fell by 5% in the first half of 2014, according to official figures. But Guan said China had locked itself into an emissions-intensive investment cycle and progress could prove to be temporary in the absence of more fundamental restructuring of the economy.<\/p>\n

The country has been building more airports, high-speed rail tracks and expressways than the market can absorb, he said, pointing out that China now has 90% of the world’s toll roads. But despite this excess capacity, investment in heavy industry continues: “It’s the wrong signal to the domestic market – we need more cement, we need more steel. So there will be more cement and steel factories built.” <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Forcing an emissions peak in China too soon could damage global efforts to tackle climate change, says climate economist Guan Dabo<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":603,"featured_media":57551,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_has_post_settings":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[761,757],"tags":[],"hashtags":[],"country":[],"class_list":["post-32372","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-climate","category-energy"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nPushing China to peak emissions early could be bad for climate | Dialogue Earth<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Forcing an emissions peak in China too soon could damage global efforts to tackle climate change, says climate economist Guan Dabo\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" 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