The world cannot count on them all to do it on their own. China, in particular, looks likely to fail to deliver on the fairly weak pledges it made in Paris. Fortunately, there is a stick available to encourage ambitions to decarbonize: a tariff based on the carbon embedded in the imports into the United States, the European Union and other rich countries.
China’s per capita pollution is much less than western countries and most of that pollution is directly linked to manufacturing for said countries.
Meanwhile, the US is trying to stop cheap solar and strangling ev production. Half of our politicians think climate change is a hoax.
China is not the problem. Articles like these are looking for a scape goat so we don’t get mad and demand changes that would affect corporate profits.
Trade-adjusted emissions drop China’s role by 9%.
9% off their total would put them at about 1/2 the per capita emissions of the US, Australia, Saudi Arabia, Canada and Russia and move them below Germany, Iran, and South Africa to be roughly in line with the UK. Given they are the biggest producer of solar panels and EVS, and have around 40% of the worlds wind capacity, 40% of the worlds solar capacity, and 30% of the worlds hydroelectric capacity, it sounds like they’re doing rather well in electrifying their still developing country.
The world can’t handle the per-capita emissions of the west — what it can handle is emissions of approximately zero. An additional industrial build-out based on fossil fuels, which will need to be scrapped before the end of its useful life, is absolutely disastrous.
China: 7.2t
Iran: 7t
South Africa: 5t
Clearly Chinas per capita trade adjusted are below Iran and South Africa.
The EU is at 7.9t btw and the data is from 2021. Since then at least non trade adjusted emissions have increased in China and have fallen in the EU. So emissions level of a Western country, while increasing emissions.
I did rough estimates using graphs, so thanks for providing numbers.
China has 3.2x the population of the EU as a whole, so with your numbers that would mean less than 1/3 the emissions output per person of the EU. That seems too low to me, where is the math failing? China is definitely lower per capita, but it’s not that much lower, is it?
Those are all per capita, otherwise they are hard to compare. So China is a bit lower then the EU, but probably not much anymore as those numbers are from 2021 and EU emissions have fallen, while Chinas emissions have gone up. However those are trade adjusted and that makes comparing numbers a lot harder. If you go for production based emissions, so all the emissions coming from the country ignoring trade, then China has higher emissions then the EU since 2016. That is why the EU does stuff like CBAM.
In general the EU does better then a lot of countries in GDP/emissions. Latin America is the other region doing really well. Brazil is about at the same level as China in terms of development, but has a quarter of the per capita emissions for example.
Obviously cummulative emissions of the EU are still higher then those of China. So the EU is much more guilty then China in that regard.
Ooh okay thank you, that makes way more sense. I should’ve realized when the numbers were so low.
I think China is on track to reducing their emissions way faster than a lot of places, just in the way they prioritize renewables compared to other places. In the cities I went, at least 80% of cars were electric, and non-car vehicles were almost all electric (scooters, rickshaws etc). I believe countrywide over 40% of cars are electric. Living in the US, that blew my mind.
I think the poverty elimination campaign likely contributed to a rise in emissions, because part of their definition of ending extreme poverty included access to electricity, food, clothing, and medical care, all of which require emissions and in rural areas likely achieved by non-renewable energy. And a lot of China is still rural.
It will be interesting to see how they proceed. If they’re able to help poorer countries develop renewable capacity through their use of economies of scale, such as how their recent production of solar has finally brought costs down to what many global south countries can afford, it might prevent those countries from requiring quite so many emissions to develop and help them skip the dirty phase of development and head directly into clean energy, which would be huge. No one will prevent countries from developing, period, so helping that development be sustainable would be massive in terms of saved emissions over them following the example of the rest of the world to do so.