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Journalism of Courage
Despite being the world’s second largest economy, China is considered a “developing” country by the United Nations, and is not mandated by the international climate change architecture to cut its greenhouse gas emissions in the short term.
However, China has been the world’s biggest emitter for more than 15 years, and now accounts for well over 30% of annual global emissions. If China does not reduce its emissions, the world is unlikely to meet its emission reduction targets.
As things stand, the world is nowhere close to the minimum emission cuts required for 2030 – at least 43% over 2019 levels. Estimates suggest that annual global emissions in 2030 would be barely 2% below 2019 levels.
The need for Chinese emission cuts is almost never discussed. Now, a first-of-its-kind analysis has suggested that China needs to reduce its emissions by 66% from current levels by 2030, and by 78% by 2035 to become 1.5-degree compliant.
The modelling has been done by Climate Action Tracker (CAT), an independent scientific project that measures progress towards the 1.5-degree and 2-degree Celsius temperature targets mentioned in the Paris Agreement adopted in 2015.
The overarching goal of the agreement, which came into force in 2016, is to hold “the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels”, and pursue efforts “to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels”.
The international climate framework applies a differentiated approach, demanding higher climate actions, including emission cuts, from the rich and developed world, while allowing developing countries greater flexibility to plan their energy transitions.
So, China is not expected to make the required deep emission cuts in the 2030 or 2035 timeframes. In fact, China’s emissions are still increasing, and are expected to be about 0.2% higher this year than in 2023, according to the latest estimate of the Global Carbon Project, which seeks to quantify GHG emissions and their causes.
But paradoxically, the hypothetical situation in which China does manage to make these very deep emission cuts in the short term may not be in the best interests of the world.
This is because, ironically enough, it can have the effect of slowing down the deployment of renewable energy — not just within China, but in the rest of the world as well.
Despite very rapid deployment of renewable energy like wind or solar — it added more than 300 GW of renewables just last year — China remains heavily dependent on fossil fuels. The share of renewable energy in its primary energy supply is still in single digits, and coal continues to generate more than half the country’s electricity.
As of now, renewables are only adding new capacities in the country — they are not replacing fossil fuels. Emissions reductions would require the rapid phasing out of coal and other fossil fuels. This can have a negative impact on industrial production.
Importantly, the manufacture of solar panels and wind turbines that are used to harness renewables like solar or wind, involves the liberal use of fossil fuels. And the global production of solar panels and wind turbines, as well as their supply chains, are heavily concentrated in China.
China controls more than 80% of the global manufacturing of solar panels, dominating every step of the process, and about 60% of the global wind turbine production.
Supplies of other clean energy technologies such as batteries, hydrogen electrolysers, and critical minerals — all of which are crucial to effect the global energy transition — are also concentrated in China.
Deep emission cuts in the short term could thus constrain the global supplies of renewable energy equipment, and slow down energy transitions everywhere. It would surely jeopardise the global renewable energy tripling target for 2030.
If China does not reduce its emissions quickly, the global emission targets for achieving the 1.5-degree threshold are likely to be missed. But if it does so, that might disrupt supplies of renewable energy across the world, making it difficult for countries to phase out fossil fuels, and thus reduce emissions.
Several countries are now realising this danger of over-dependence on China for critical technologies and resources related to clean energy. The disruption of supply chains during the Covid-19 pandemic exposed the vulnerabilities of over-concentrated production processes. At least a part of United States President-elect Donald Trump’s anxieties related to China seem to stem from these concerns.
The diversification of renewable energy supply chains, particularly solar photovoltaic manufacturing, is now a central theme of most discussions on energy transitions. It is not that other countries cannot manufacture these products — but competing against the Chinese on costs could be difficult. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), China is the most cost-competitive location for manufacture of all components of the solar PV supply chain.
“Costs in China are 10 per cent lower than in India, 20 per cent lower than in the United States, and 35 per cent lower than in Europe,” the IEA said in an assessment published in 2022. (Special Report on Solar PV Global Supply Chains)
No country has benefited from the international climate framework as much as China has. China happened to be at the right place at the right time — but it also made full use of the opportunities that came its way.
Even at the time the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was finalised in the 1990s, China’s emissions were not insignificant. It accounted for more than 10% of global emissions at the time — much more than India’s share currently.
But because China did not have historical emissions, it was not mandated to control or reduce its emissions.
China’s emissions have grown almost four times since then, even as its economic indicators have become comparable to or better than many developed countries. Its share in historical emissions has also grown to about 11.5%, equivalent to the contribution of the European Union.
China’s meteoric rise to become the second largest economy and one of the two superpowers in the world can at least partly be attributed to the fact that it has not had to worry about imposing tough emissions standards, which its competitors like the US, Japan, or Germany had to.
It is not as though China is not contributing to the global fight against climate change. Indeed, it is at the centre of the renewable energy transition.
By the end of this year, it will have almost certainly achieved its target of reaching 1,200 GW of renewable energy capacity, six years ahead of deadline. Possibly its most important contribution has been to ensure cheap manufacturing of renewable energy, which has made solar and wind energy affordable. In most countries, solar is now the cheapest source of power when the Sun is available.
But China’s emissions are now almost three times that of the US — and it continues to remain largely unconstrained by climate change regulations. That is why any emission reduction targets in the near term, whether 2030 or 2035, remain extremely unrealistic, and unlikely to be achieved.
