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What is clear about the present Chinese emphasis on ecological
civilization is that it has emerged out of a broad socialist
perspective, influenced by both Marxian analysis and China's own
distinct history, culture, and vernacular. In China, as opposed to the
West, the land remains social or collective property and cannot be sold.
I believe it is wrong therefore to see China's initiative in the
construction of ecological civilization to be a direct outgrowth of
Western-style ecological modernism, as some have supposed. At the 17th
National Congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC), in 2007 it was
officially proposed that China should build an "ecological
civilization," creating more sustainable relations between production,
consumption, distribution, and economic growth.
--John Bellamy Foster
NY Times, Nov. 4 2015
China Burns Much More Coal Than Reported, Complicating Climate Talks
By CHRIS BUCKLEY
BEIJING — China, the world’s leading emitter of greenhouse gases from
coal, has been burning up to 17 percent more coal a year than the
government previously disclosed, according to newly released data. The
finding could complicate the already difficult efforts to limit global
warming.
Even for a country of China’s size, the scale of the correction is
immense. The sharp upward revision in official figures means that China
has released much more carbon dioxide — almost a billion more tons a
year according to initial calculations — than previously estimated.
The increase alone is greater than the whole German economy emits
annually from fossil fuels.
Officials from around the world will have to come to grips with the new
figures when they gather in Paris this month to negotiate an
international framework for curtailing greenhouse-gas pollution. The
data also pose a challenge for scientists who are trying to reduce
China’s smog, which often bathes whole regions in acrid, unhealthy haze.
The Chinese government has promised to halt the growth of its emissions
of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse pollutant from coal and other
fossil fuels, by 2030. The new data suggest that the task of meeting
that deadline by reducing China’s dependence on coal will be more
daunting and urgent than expected, said Yang Fuqiang, a former energy
official in China who now advises the Natural Resources Defense Council.
“This will have a big impact, because China has been burning so much
more coal than we believed,” Mr. Yang said. “It turns out that it was an
even bigger emitter than we imagined. This helps to explain why China’s
air quality is so poor, and that will make it easier to get national
leaders to take this seriously.”
The new data, which appeared recently in an energy statistics yearbook
published without fanfare by China’s statistical agency, show that coal
consumption has been underestimated since 2000, and particularly in
recent years. The revisions were based on a census of the economy in
2013 that exposed gaps in data collection, especially from small
companies and factories.
Illustrating the scale of the revision, the new figures add about 600
million tons to China’s coal consumption in 2012 — an amount equivalent
to more than 70 percent of the total coal used annually by the United
States.
“It’s been a confusing situation for a long time,” said Ayaka Jones, a
China analyst at the United States Energy Information Administration in
Washington. She said the new data vindicated her earlier analysis of
China’s preliminary statistics, which flagged significantly increased
numbers for coal use and overall energy consumption.
The new data indicated that much of the change came from heavy industry
— including plants that produce coal chemicals and cement, as well as
those using coking coal, which goes to make steel, Ms. Jones said. The
correction for coal use in electric power generation was much smaller.
Officials accepted the need to correct worsening distortions in the old
data but have not commented publicly on the changes, according to Lin
Boqiang, director of the China Center for Energy Economics Research at
Xiamen University in eastern China. Mr. Lin said in a telephone
interview that this was partly because the new figures made it more
complicated to set and assess the country’s clean-energy goals.
“It’s created a lot of bewilderment,” he said. “Our basic data will have
to be adjusted, and the international agencies will also have to adjust
their databases. This is troublesome because many forecasts and
commitments were based on the previous data.”
When President Xi Jinping proposed that China’s emissions stop growing
by 2030, he did not say what level they would reach by then. The new
numbers may mean that the peak will be higher, but they also raise hopes
that emissions will crest many years sooner, Mr. Yang, the climate
adviser, said.
“I think this implies that we’re closer to a peak, because there’s also
been a falloff in coal consumption in the past couple of years,” he said.
Chinese energy and statistics agency officials did not respond to faxed
requests for comment on the data revisions.
The press office of the International Energy Agency said by email that
the organization would revise its own data to reflect China’s revisions,
starting with numbers for 2011 to 2013 that will be released Wednesday.
The agency estimated, based on the new figures, that China’s carbon
dioxide pollution in 2011 and 2012 was 4 percent to 6 percent greater
than previously thought.
But some scientists said the difference could be much larger.
Jan Ivar Korsbakken, a senior researcher at the Center for International
Climate and Environmental Research in Oslo, said that based on his
preliminary analysis, the new data implied that China had released about
900 million metric tons more carbon dioxide from 2011 to 2013.
That would be an 11 percent increase in emissions, he said. For
comparison, the International Energy Agency estimated before the
revision that China had emitted 8.25 billion tons of carbon dioxide from
fossil fuels in 2012. Dr. Korsbakken, a physicist, emphasized that
deeper analysis of the new data was needed before firm conclusions could
be drawn.
When estimating emissions, scientists prefer to account for coal use by
the amount of energy in it rather than by its raw mass, which includes
impurities that end up as ash. Measured in energy terms, Dr. Korsbakken
said, China consumed 10 percent to 15 percent more coal than the old
data had showed from 2005 to 2013, the last year for which the new and
old figures can be compared. The revisions for 2001 through 2004 were
smaller.
Economists have grown increasingly skeptical about the economic data
China publishes, and the revisions open a new episode in the debate over
its energy use and greenhouse-gas emissions.
China burned or otherwise consumed 4.2 billion metric tons in 2013,
according to the new data, and its emissions now far exceed those of any
other country, including the United States, the second-largest emitter.
This is not the first time China has underestimated its coal
consumption. In the late 1990s, small coal mines were ordered to close,
but many of them simply stopped reporting their output to the
government. For a time, this created an erroneous impression that China
had succeeded in generating economic growth without increasing emissions.
More recently, some scientists concluded that China’s emissions were
lower than widely believed because the coal it was using burned less
efficiently than researchers had generally assumed. But Mr. Yang said
that conclusion had been disputed.
The revised numbers do not alter scientists’ estimates of the total
amount of carbon dioxide in the air. That is measured directly, not
inferred from fuel consumption statistics the way countries’ emissions
are usually estimated.
So if China’s emissions have been much greater than believed,
researchers will want to understand where the extra carbon dioxide
output ended up — for example, how it might have been absorbed in
natural “sinks” like forests or oceans, said Josep G. Canadell,
executive director of the Global Carbon Project, which studies the
sources and flows of greenhouse-gas pollution.
“If the emissions are partially wrong,” Mr. Canadell said, “we’ll be
wrong in attributing carbon sources and sinks.”
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