In 2013, pictures of extremely smoggy
Chinese cities hit the Internet and the world reacted with shock. The air quality index reportedly rose to
nine hundred and ninety three in certain neighborhoods and absolutely
off-the-charts f igure. Living in Beijing was equated to
living in an airport smoking lounge. People were dying at the rate
of four thousand a day. It's not that people didn't know that
pollution in China was a problem. Since around 2006, China has been
the global leader in annual carbon emissions, surpassing the U.S. But seen the images alongside
the data drove it home. The country was in bad shape. Previous attempts at climate diplomacy had
failed to elicit real change. But in 2015, China and the U.S. both helped negotiate
the Paris Agreement. Each country set emissions targets intended
to be strengthened over time. So we've seen the last decade an
incredible rate of growth in China of clean tech, pushed in no small
measure by air quality concerns, but equally pushed by the idea of China
being a global marketer for clean alternatives. The country has become
the world's largest manufacturer of solar panels, lithium ion
batteries and electric vehicles. China buys over half of the world's
new electric cars and nearly all of the world's electric busses. So when Trump withdrew the U.S. from the Paris Agreement, China became
the signatory with the most economic clout and a
de facto climate leader. In some ways, China has stepped up. President Xi Jinping recently announced the
country's intent to be carbon neutral by 2060,
strengthening previous commitments. But climate leader is a complicated
designation for a country that also burns more coal than the
rest of the world combined. And while experts say that international
pressure could push China to decarbonize more quickly, frayed U.S.-China
relations might make climate cooperation difficult for new
President-elect Joe Biden. That trust that was built up over
the eight years of the Obama presidency, that needs to be rebuilt. Biden says he wants to reassert
American leadership in the fight against climate change. For starters, he plans
to recommit to the Paris Agreement and invest two trillion dollars
in clean energy initiatives. That's going to mean, first and
foremost, bringing a domestic conversation to the fore, succeeding. You can't talk to the rest of the
world about what you intend to do internationally unless you've got
something at home. But when it comes to domestic
and international climate commitments, the U.S. has undoubtedly
fallen behind China. Here's how it happened and what it
means for the fight against climate change. Unlike the U.S., where CO2 emissions have been
on the rise since the Industrial Revolution, China's emissions remained minimal
throughout much of the 20th century. But beginning in 1979,
economic reforms loosened state control over private industry and opened up trade
with the rest of the world. This, combined with widely available,
cheap labor, exploitative working conditions and permissive health,
safety and environmental regulations, led to a manufacturing boom
and rapid infrastructure build out. But it came at a cost. Starting in 2001, when China joined
the WTO, it tripled its coal consumption to power its economic miracle
- a decade when it quadrupled its GDP and quintupled its exports. So that was devastating in terms of
its environmental impact, even as it enabled China to lift hundreds of
millions of people out of poverty. But when it came to the point
in 2013 where people couldn't breathe, that's when China realized that it
needed to rein in coal. That year, the government announced a
$277 billion dollar plan to decrease pollution in Beijing by curbing
coal use and vehicle emissions. That helped set the stage for
China's participation in the 2015 Paris Agreement negotiations, in which nearly
200 countries committed to individual emissions targets with regular
reviews and updates required. China's Paris commitments included a pledge
to peak emissions by 2030, after which CO2
levels would decrease. The country boosted its investment in green
energy as it decided that bold climate action was in its
best interest, both economically and geopolitically. As China tries to build its
status on the global stage, i t definitely sees no benefits from being
a leader in clean energy and renewables. While China's single-party authoritarian
system often leads to corruption and inefficiency, i t does
allow the country to act decisively when it comes to investing in
green energy tech and infrastructure, such as the billions of dollars in
subsidies that it's poured into electric vehicle development. In the U.S., similar
efforts often get tied up in partisan battles, not to mention
skepticism over the science behind climate change itself, something that's not
up for debate among Chinese decision makers. It's a debate
about balancing risk and cost. It's a debate about
obligation and responsibility. But it so far has never been a
debate about the reality of the science. That's been accepted. Mostly, the
Chinese government views renewable energy as a
major economic opportunity. Now it's the leading producer, investor
and consumer of renewable energy in the world. Nearly one out of every three
solar panels and one out of every three wind turbines in the
world is in China today. It's also home to half of the world's
electric cars and 98 percent of its electric busses. China is huge, though. So while it produces the most
renewable energy in absolute terms, that doesn't necessarily translate to a drastically
higher share of the mix. About 13 percent of energy consumed
in China comes from renewables, compared to 11 percent in the U.S. and about 18 percent in the
European Union as a whole. China has committed to raising that proportion
to 20 percent by 2030, b ut to do so, the country will need
to definitively move away from coal, which still makes up 58 percent
of the energy mix. And that won't be easy. Half of
China's coal is burned in heavy industry directly. China's factories produce half of
the world's steel and cement. And unfortunately, right now, we
don't have readily available alternatives that are cost-effective. So that's going to require China
to expend massive investments and efforts in order to develop cleaner alternatives
for industries, such as green hydrogen. Because heavy
industry involves heat-intensive emissions-producing processes, it is
notoriously difficult to decarbonize. And natural gas, the cleanest fossil
fuel source, is not as easily available in China as it
is in the U.S. So to meet the country's growing
energy needs, China has actually been relaxing restrictions on building
new coal plants. After peaking during the so-called
"airpocalypse" of 2013, total coal consumption has ticked upwards again
for the last three years. And as of June 2020, there were
249.6 gigawatts of new coal power in development. That's greater than the total
amount of coal capacity in either the U.S. or India. It's a big problem for a nation
that's trying to position itself as a global climate leader and a trend that
can't continue if China is going to meet the new, stronger targets it
just set at the U.N. General Assembly, when President Xi
Jinping announced the country's intent to peak emissions before 2030 and
attain carbon neutrality by 2060. The Paris Agreement on climate change charts
the course for the world to transition to green
and low-carbon development. It outlines the minimum steps to be
taken to protect the earth, o ur shared homeland, and all countries must
take decisive steps to honor this agreement. Xi's announcement contrasted sharply
with remarks made by President Trump earlier in the day,
in which he attacked China's environmental record while making no mention
of any national climate goals for the United States. Those who attack America's exceptional
environmental record while ignoring China's rampant pollution are not
interested in the environment. They only want to punish America. And I will not stand for it. But internationally, Xi's speech made waves,
with both Japan and South Korea since announcing their own plans
to reach carbon neutrality by 2050. So China's announcement is providing some
really needed momentum in the international climate negotiations. And it's also a major game changer
in the domestic realm, because what we're already seeing is that every
ministry and every company, every state-owned enterprise, every research institute
now has to take climate and this carbon neutrality
pledge into account. Experts say that it will be
an unprecedented challenge and success will rely upon the country's further expansion
of the already booming renewable energy industry, combined with major
investments in nascent energy technologies like green hydrogen and
carbon capture and storage. Wind and solar, I think are pretty clearly
going to be an important part of the toolkit to reach net-zero. In the next 10 years, I think we
want to see energy storage, hydrogen, all of those things be competitive
with their fossil counterparts. So governments need to be supporting
those and scaling those up. It's going to be a balancing act. Does coal go away before
the climate warms too much? Do renewables grow fast enough so they
can take advantage of that virtuous cycle? Will demand for
new energy require both? Or can they creat e a model in
which clean energy wins and dirty energy is withdrawn from the system? That's the test. And we
don't yet know the outcome. But as China builds on its
commitments under the Paris Agreement, the United States is just trying to
get back into the game. In 2016, four days after the
Paris agreement entered into force, America elected Donald Trump as its next
president and the implications for global climate cooperation were immediate. Trump questioned the scientific consensus
on climate change and announced that the U.S. would leave the Paris
agreement, claiming that it was unfair and developing countries should
be doing more. Look at China, how filthy it is. Look at Russia. Look at India. It's filthy. The the air is filthy. The Paris Accord, I took us out because
we were going to have to spend trillions of dollars and we
were treated very unfairly. While the U.S. was not allowed to
formally withdraw until November 4th of this year, t he Trump administration
had already abandoned dozens of Obama-era climate policies, rolling back
regulations to reduce emissions from power plants and weakening rules
that encourage the development of fuel-efficient vehicles. While Biden plans to rejoin the
Paris Agreement , the U.S. is not on track to
meet its emissions targets. It lost us critical time that we could
ill afford to lose as we were seeking to make these
global deep reductions. We know what the world of a degree
and a half of warming will look like, and it's bad. And we know the
world of two degrees and it's worse. And we have lost four years of
growing a global consensus around more aggressive action. The Paris Agreement's initial
goals were met only as a starting point, and its future success
depends on nations pushing each other to set increasingly
bold emissions targets. If you added up all the Paris climate
pledges that were made in 2015, they wouldn't bring us even one third of
the way towards achieving the two degrees Celsius target, let alone
the 1.5 degrees Celsius target. No country's Paris
commitments were sufficient. So in order to get where we need
to go, every country needs to step up. When the U.S. left, Pershing says it
did cause an overall slowdown in international climate action
and commitments. But importantly, the agreement remained
intact, leaving the U.S. behind. The world did not abandon
the agenda when the U.S. left. China didn't do very much,
but it didn't walk away. It did make massive
investments in renewable energy. It did maintain its commitment to meet
its obligations under Paris and in fact, is quite close to getting to
the target that it had pledged. Now, with China's newly updated climate
targets, it certainly seems like the country has the political will to
decarbonize, if not all the tech to make it possible. And once Biden
takes office in January, he's promised that the U.S. will prioritize climate
change again too, rejoining other climate leaders like the European Union
and India, who are also pursuing bold energy investments
and emissions goals. In a new administration, th
ere's several things the U.S. needs to do right away in
order to restore its climate leadership. And the first, of course, is to
rejoin the Paris Agreement, which can be done very easily. The second is to strengthen its
existing Paris commitments, l ike every country was supposed to do this year. The U.S. had initially pledged to reduce
emissions by 26 to 28 percent below 2005 levels by 2025. But that goal was deemed
"critically insufficient" by Climate Action Tracker, an independent website
that measures country-level progress towards the goal of keeping global
warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius. By the same metric, China's
Paris commitments were deemed "highly insufficient," the second
worst designation. It's clear that both nations must
strive for more stringent targets. Together, the two superpowers represent about
40 percent of global GDP and 42 percent of
global carbon emissions. So they'll need to cooperate
despite their strained relationship. The issues around trade, the issues
around human rights, the issues around Hong Kong or Taiwan which
divide us are very significant. How that plays out for a new
administration that wants to work on climate remains to be seen. But we should be
clear - there isn't a solution for the global community unless
China is in. And almost as clearly there isn't
a solution with the U.S. not in. Luckily, some think that
climate policy provides a natural opportunity for partnership and can lead
to a mutually beneficial race to the top for innovation in green tech. I think this will be an area
that remains one for positive collaboration, discussion, friendly competition. I think the United States still leads
the world in innovation and can lead the world in the development of
next generation technologies that will be necessary for us to reach
the Paris climate targets. Finamore also says that if the U.S. wants to avert a climate disaster, it
must join China in adopting a net-zero emissions target. A number of other nations, including the
UK, France and New Zealand, have already made such a pledge. That means that three fifths of
global CO2 emissions would be covered. This is incredibly important. This is the really only way that we
are going to have a chance of avoiding the most catastrophic impacts of
climate change throughout the world.
Anyone who thinks solar panels are renewable doesn’t understand materials science. It’s not like you just build them and have a fixed energy output every year forever. These things break down and need to be replaced and repaired every 20 or so years. That requires metals. Even relatively abundant metals like copper are hitting peak availability.
Don’t get me wrong, this is a great start. But to think that there is a long term sustainability play in wind and solar is foolish. It’s a bandaid at best.
Yes they might produce a lot of solar panels, but are they actually implementing them themselves? or just selling them to the rest of the world? Are they not still one of the primary polluters of the world and largest consumers of coal? Or is my understanding outdated? Legit question