China’s CO2 Emissions Continue To Rise–Greenpeace Shocked!

By Paul Homewood

h/t Joe Public

Greenpeace seem surprised that China’s emissions are still rising. They must not have read the country’s INDC!

China’s carbon emissions growth has accelerated since the beginning of the year, leading to warnings that the country could be headed for its largest annual increase in climate pollution since 2011.

Led by increased demand for coal, oil and gas, China’s CO2 emissions for the first three months of 2018 were 4% higher than they were for the same period in 2017, according to an Unearthed analysis of new government figures.

Analysts have suggested the country’s carbon emissions could rise this year by 5% — the largest annual increase in seven years, back when the airpocalypse was at its peak.

This latest uptick in carbon emissions was unexpected. Many thought the government’s 2016 stimulus – which kicked off a construction surge fueled by coal-burning industries – was a temporary state of affairs, following years of falling coal use and carbon emissions.

But big spending on energy intensive industries persisted through 2017, meaning China has been backsliding on the climate progress it made earlier this decade and the rest of the world must redouble efforts simply to ensure global CO2 emissions don’t climb dramatically.

Time to panic?

For the decade up to 2013, China’s CO2 emissions were the dominant driver of global emissions growth, making it nearly impossible for global emissions to peak.

Now government data indicates China’s CO2 emissions went up 4.0% on the first quarter, after a 2% increase in 2017. Calculating demand from government data on production, trade, and industry data on inventories, coal demand increased 3.5%, oil demand 4.3%, gas demand 10% while cement output fell 4.5%. This has led researchers to warn that we could see a 5% increase in emissions from China this year, the largest since 2011.

When China’s coal use fell and CO2 emissions stabilized in 2013-2016, this opened a much-needed window for global emissions to peak and decline as required to avoid the worst consequences of climate change.

However, in the past two years, the government has been running an aggressive stimulus program that has breathed life to smokestack industries and set the clock back on the economic transformation and clean energy transition that are so crucial for the country’s future.

If China’s emissions are indeed going back to rapid growth, it means that the rest of the world would have to run just to stay in place – keep global emissions from increasing. The task of achieving a rapid and sustained decline in global emissions would become essentially impossible. The battle against air pollution has also been made harder by the growth in polluting industries – as Unearthed has been highlighting since summer 2016.

https://unearthed.greenpeace.org/2018/05/30/china-co2-carbon-climate-emissions-rise-in-2018/

Electricity stats from the China Energy Portal show how electricity generation is continuing to rise, up 8% in Q1, year on year. The bulk of this increase has come from thermal.

https://chinaenergyportal.org/en/2018-q1-electricity-statistics/

As I have repeatedly pointed out, the trajectory of China’s energy demand and emissions is dependent on economic growth. Whether growth in the last year or two can be maintained is debatable.

However, if it is maintained, CO2 emissions will be much higher than now by 2030, just as China’s INDC at Paris explicitly made clear.