Abstract
On September 22, 2020, at the General Debate of the 75th Session of the UN General Assembly, Chinese President Xi Jinping delivered a speech and promised that China would peak carbon emissions prior to 2030 and try to achieve carbon neutrality by 2060. That will be a very daunting task for China.
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Change history
07 May 2023
A correction has been published.
Notes
- 1.
Subsequently the Chinese government redefied the goal of “achieving carbon neutrality by 2060” as including not just CO2 but all GHGs.
- 2.
Globally, the total amount of CO2 emissions reached 40.1 billion tons in 2019, about 86% of which was from fossil-fuels and 14% from land use. Of the total, 31% was sequestered by the land, 23% by the ocean, and the rest (or 46%) went up into the atmosphere.
- 3.
In the composition of GHG defined Kyoto Protocol, Carbon Dioxide (CO2) takes about 81%, Methane (CH4) 10%, Nitrous Oxide (N2O) 7%, and the rest are Fluorinated Gases (e.g., hydrofluorocarbon (HFCs), perfluorocarbon (PFCs), and sulfur hexafluoride (SF6)), about 3%.
- 4.
The Ministry of Environmental Protection from 2009 publishes the China’s Climate Change Policy and Action Annual Report annually.
- 5.
Carbon removal or decarbonization is a term that includes many forms of carbon removal from the atmosphere, whether through land sequestration or through negative emissions technologies that actively pull CO2 out of the atmosphere, such as direct air capture or biomass energy with carbon capture and storage.
- 6.
- 7.
Note that at the fundamental level this categorization is debatable. For example, in the scheme of “cap and trade” of CO2 emissions in ETS, the “cap” is ultimately set by the government and then the firm get to “trade”. And arguably, to the extent that ETSs in China are still in the piloting stage and carbon pricing is still subject to government guidance, they can be discussed generally under PPA as well. More pointedly, in a transitional economy like China’s, whether or not to set up these markets can be understood as a public policy choice.
- 8.
India is the highest in the proportion of renewable energy among the five countries in Fig. 2 as India is still dominated by firewood.
- 9.
CHINAGEM is developed by the policy research center of Victoria University, Australia.
- 10.
To be conservative, we do not select 3.5% and 4% as the decline rate.
- 11.
Generally, Nordhaus assumes a high discount rate between the present and the future and therefore proposes a more gradual carbon tax than Stern, who assumes a lower discount rate and advocates stronger and immediate action.
- 12.
As a policy recommendation, one way to consider imposing carbon taxation would be: (a) to figure out the sector-specific average level of carbon intensity, say, in every 3-5 years; and (b) to impose progressive taxes on those that are above the average level of carbon intensity and subsidize those below the average level for technology innovations toward further decarbonization.
- 13.
In terms of wind power, in light of the great heterogeneity of wind source across the vast territories of China, enhanced regional coordination in stable power supply would be critical.
- 14.
The current dual-track system of ETSs in China—seven regional markets and one national market—is an illustration of the latent issue of conflict of interest unique to the political economy of the vast country. Given different industrial structures across different regions in China, arguably one national ETS covering all industrial sectors and all at once without transition period runs the risk of widening rather than narrowing the already palpable regional imbalances in terms of both economic development and wealth distribution. Unlike regional ETSs which cover different industrial sectors, China’s national ETS, as currently designed, only covers the power sector, and electricity is more or less homogenous across the whole country.
- 15.
For instance, presently about 60% of power or 1.08 billion kw of electricity in China is coal-fired, and much of it was installed in the past 15 years, and normally won’t retire until 20–30 years later. Early retirement will incur additional costs ceteris paribus—a daunting task especially for economically poor regions of China.
- 16.
If the US and EU decide to impose transborder carbon tax, that would have significant impact on Chinese exports, as well as on exports from other developing countries. A critical variable to consider here is to what extent would the transborder carbon tax be earmarked for green technology transfers from the developed to the developing countries.
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Fu, J., Xu, J., Liu, Y., Xie, L., Liu, S. (2022). Achieving Carbon Neutrality by 2060: What (More) Has to Be Done?. In: Fu, J., Zhang, D., Lei, M. (eds) Climate Mitigation and Adaptation in China. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-4310-1_7
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