When you hear that malevolent old fool Donald Trump tell the United Nations that climate change is “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world”, it’s hard to resist throwing up your arms in despair. If mighty America won’t set a good example, what hope is there for the rest of us?
But nature abhors a vacuum. And if the Americans are too busy making themselves great again to want to keep leading the world to a better future, my guess is that the aspiring great power China will be only too happy to take the reins.
Truth is, the Yanks have never been fully committed to leading the energy transition from fossil fuels to renewables. When the Democrats are in power, they make the right noises, but whenever the Republicans take over they revert to uninterest. Until now, they’ve been like our Liberals, never openly opposing action to limit climate change, but never keen to get on with doing anything.
You’d be hard-pressed to believe there was a majority of climate-change believers in Congress. It’s never taken over national leadership of the transition to renewable energy.
Rather, as our Climate Council lobby group has explained, what progress the Yanks have made has come from pro-climate action state governments, which cover more than half of the US economy, as well as many companies sticking to the goal of net zero emissions by 2050.
And America’s record on emissions of greenhouse gases isn’t as bad as you might expect. The world’s second-biggest economy (when you measure it correctly, taking account of the fact that $US1 buys a lot less in the US than it does in China) accounts for the second-largest share of annual global emissions, 11 per cent.
Its annual emissions have fallen a little in recent years, driven by a shift from coal to natural gas and increased use of renewables for electricity. Even so, the decline to date isn’t big enough to meet the Biden administration’s goal of reducing emissions by at least 50 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030.
But here’s the point: China is the great contradiction. On one hand, being the world’s largest economy (correctly measured), it’s the world’s greatest single emitter, accounting for about 30 per cent of global emissions. (Since you didn’t ask, Australia’s share of annual emissions is 1 per cent, although our emissions per person are an embarrassingly high 22 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent.)
On the other hand, China is the country doing most to move to renewables. The Climate Council says that, since 2020, China’s solar capacity has almost quadrupled, and its wind capacity has doubled. It achieved its 2030 renewable energy target six years early.
This momentum on clean energy is occurring at the same time as more coal-fired power stations are being built. But the new stations are replacing old ones, causing no net increase in coal-fired power. Indeed, in the first half of this year, coal-fired generation fell by 3.4 per cent compared with last year’s first half.
China’s climate pollution seems to have peaked in recent times, actually dropping in the first half of this year. This would be up to five years ahead of the Chinese government’s expectation. If this peak and downturn are sustained, this is, as the Climate Council says, “a major milestone in the worldwide shift to clean energy”.
Last week, while Trump was at the UN trumpeting his stupidity to the world, President Xi Jinping was there to announce China’s commitment under the Paris Agreement to reduce its emissions by at least 7 to 10 per cent by 2035.
The modesty of this promise prompted disappointment and disapproval. But before people’s righteous indignation reaches too high, there are a few points to remember.
First is the statisticians’ distinction between stocks and flows. Everyone tends to focus on this year’s flow of greenhouse gas emissions, which adds to the existing huge stock of gases in the atmosphere, which has been building up since the Industrial Revolution.
Obviously, if the stock is already too high, any annual addition is bad. We should be reducing our annual addition ASAP. But it’s the huge existing stock of gases in the atmosphere that’s doing almost all the damage.
If we ask which countries contributed most to the stock of gases, it’s the big rich countries: the US and parts of Europe. Our efforts over the past 200 years to make ourselves as rich as we are today created the climate disturbance. The poor countries during those 200 years, including China, contributed stuff-all to the problem.
China’s biggest annual emissions are explained by its population, 1.4 billion people, plus its success in raising their material standard of living from poor to middle-income in just a few decades. Its emissions per person are still only about half ours.
It would be the height of hypocrisy for the countries that got rich by wrecking the world’s climate now to tell the poor countries they must abandon their efforts to make their citizens even remotely as well-off as we are.
That’s why no one in the rich world is entitled to criticise the Chinese for their huge emissions. And it’s why we should be hugely impressed and grateful for their great effort and success in moving to renewables.
Next, remember that China is the global leader in renewable technology manufacturing. It supplies 80 per cent of the world’s solar panels and 70 per cent of electric vehicles. It’s also the leading world supplier of wind turbines. If it isn’t already the biggest in batteries, it will be.
China’s massive output of clean machines has slashed the world cost of renewables relative to fossil fuel energy, and is now powering the switch to renewables in many countries, including ours.
Finally, when tempted to criticise China’s modest promise to reduce emissions, remember that whereas our politicians tend to overpromise and underdeliver, the Chinese prefer to do it the other way – as their recent overshoots well demonstrate.
With the Yanks going off the reservation, we’re in safer hands with the commos.
