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Sat, 6th Mar 2021 14:00:00 |
Launching The World’s Largest Carbon Credit System |
Late last year, in a shockingly ambitious pledge, Chinese president Xi Jinping announced that his country would reach peak domestic greenhouse gas emissions by the end of the decade and that China would bring its carbon footprint all the way down to net zero by just 2060. The targets are as timely as they are ambitious; according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (the world’s premier authority on the issue) we have just a decade left to change our emissions outputs drastically enough to avoid the worst effects of climate change.
So it’s great news for all of us that China, the world’s biggest greenhouse gas emitter by a considerable margin, is getting serious about curbing their carbon footprint. However, there remains a considerable gap--nay, a chasm--between Beijing’s lofty climate-friendly rhetoric and the country’s actual and projected emissions--both of which are hefty to say the least.
China currently produces about a third of the world’s total carbon emissions each year (to the tune of more than 10 gigatonnes), with about a third of those emissions coming directly from coal. While Beijing has sped to ramp up domestic clean energy production in recent years, the world’s second-largest economy is still dependent on the especially dirty fossil fuel for over half of its power production. In fact, at the same time that President Xi has touted Beijing’s climate goals, much of the country has gone back to coal for reasons of energy and economic security. As of last year, according to reporting by Forbes, China was either presently adding or planning to add more coal-fired capacity than the present total capacity of either the U.S. or India. And that’s just domestic--China has considerably increased overseas coal production as well.
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