Yesterday China announced that by 2017 the country will launch the world’s largest carbon trading market. This is huge news, and many outlets wrote about it, including Mother Jones: China Says It Will Start the World’s Biggest Carbon Market by 2017.

This is a well written article, and I’d suggest to anyone to read it, but there is a line in the article that made me stop and twist my head a bit.

From the article:

“And cap-and-trade will be just one part of a wide-ranging agreement announced between the two countries, building on a breakthrough deal forged by President Obama and President Xi last November in Beijing, in which China promised to finally start to taper its coal use.” [emphasis added]

Finally.

Collective action problems like decarbonization create the constant temptation to believe that others are being worse actors than ourselves. I don’t believe that the author of this piece was consciously attempting to promote such an idea. However I do think this shows how memes with weak foundations, but comforting implications, persist in our public discourse in subtle ways.

What is the actual state of China’s coal use, and how does it actually compare to other countries, particularly the US?

Take a look at the data:

Source: Wolfram Alpha [1]

China’s per capita coal consumption only reached parity with US levels for the first time in 2012.

And in case anybody is thinking that things may have changed substantially in the last couple years (beyond the range of Wolfram Alpha’s dataset), here’s the latest snapshot (2014) [2, 3]:

2014 per Capita Coal Consumption

China: 2.53 t / person year

US: 2.59 t / person year

China needs to reduce it’s coal consumption dramatically, as many countries do (see Addendum data below). Nonetheless, China’s level of consumption is not out of line with US or other countries’ levels - while undergoing the most rapid period of economic development of a country in human history [4]. In contrast, the US consumed at a rate of >3 metric tons per person year for the entire period of 1984–2008, a level that China has never reached (and hopefully will not).

Regarding China’s announcement, on its face it is a serious step forward — but as with any cap-and-trade system, much depends on the details. What level will the emissions cap be set at, and what will be the schedule for reduction of emissions permits over time?

More Country Comparisons

A few additional examples of heavy per capita coal consumers ca. 2012 [5]:

Australia: 5.81 t / person year

South Africa: 3.66 t / person year

Poland: 3.47 t / person year

Germany: 2.99 t / person year

China: 2.58 t / person year

South Korea: 2.55 t / person year

United States: 2.5 t / person year

Sources