- China’s President Xi Jinping stunned climate action observers in a speech at the United Nations general assembly last week with a pledge to reach “peak carbon” before 2030, and drive down emissions to virtually zero by 2060.
- As the world’s largest consumer of coal and the second largest consumer of oil – behind the US – China produces more than a quarter of the world’s annual carbon emissions.
- The Climate Action Tracker research consortium has calculated that if China succeeds, its ambitions would effectively shave 0.2 to 0.3°C from global heating forecasts for 2100, down to around 2.4 to 2.5°C above pre-industrialised levels.
- This is still well above the 1.5˚C heating limit that the signatories of the 2015 Paris agreement had hoped to achieve.
- China’s pledge emerged days after the EU toughened its own 2030 climate targets, raising the chances of a powerful economic coalition between the two that would cover a third of the world’s carbon emissions.
- US, now the only major polluting country which has yet to set a target to end its contribution to the climate crisis and coming as the US president, Donald Trump, prepares to pull out of the Paris Climate Agreement in November.
- The single largest reduction in emissions on record would require nothing less than a complete inversion of China’s existing energy system, one that promises to reverberate across global energy markets.
- Today, fossil fuels account for about 85% of China’s energy mix, and renewable energy makes up 15%.
- It is likely that these proportions would need to flip by 2060 to achieve carbon neutrality.
- The largest challenge for China will be its growing number of coal-fired power plants. China consumes around half of the global supply to power its coal-fired plants.
- Its government set targets allowing another 60 GW of coal-fired projects to go into operation.
- It has more than 250 GW of new capacity either proposed or under construction.
