China’s greenhouse gas emissions have caught up with the US and will not fall any time soon, a top Chinese official said yesterday, while warning of a huge economic blow from global warming.
The comments from Xie Zhenhua (謝振華), a deputy chief of the National Development and Reform Commission, which steers climate change policy, marked China’s first official acknowledgment that it could already be the world’s biggest greenhouse gas polluter.
Many experts believe China’s output of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas from burning fossil fuels, has already outstripped the US, for more than a century the world’s biggest emitter.
Until now, however, Chinese officials have hedged on the issue and have released no new government data on emissions growth for the past 14 years. Nor did Xie give specific numbers.
“Based on information we have at hand, our total emissions are about the same as the United States,” he told a news conference held to release a government paper on climate change. “Whether or not we have surpassed the United States is not in itself important.”
Xie said that rich countries during their own economic take-offs had produced nearly all the greenhouse gases from human activity already in the atmosphere.
Official acknowledgment that China could be the biggest emitter is unlikely to shift Beijing’s position on climate change. But it underscores the giddying expansion of the nation’s power plants, factories and vehicles, and may add international pressure on it as the world enters an intense phase of negotiations over a new global warming pact.
Even several years ago, scientists expected China to surpass the US in carbon dioxide emissions only in 2019 or later.
The US Oak Ridge National Laboratory has estimated the US emitted 1.6 billion tonnes of carbon from burning fossil fuels last year, compared to China’s 1.8 billion tonnes.
Total world emissions were about 8.5 billion tonnes.
Beijing has said it wants to combat climate change, yet ensure China’s economic take-off is not dragged down. Xie’s comments and the government “white paper” reflected the uneasy fit between those concerns.
China faces shrinking harvests, worsening droughts in some regions, worsening floods in others, and melting glaciers as average global temperatures rise, the report warns.
“Climate change has already brought real threats to China’s ecological system and economic and social development,” Xie said.
But the report released by Xie also says China would nonetheless increase emissions of carbon dioxide, as it seeks to lift hundreds of millions of its poor into prosperity.
“China will strive for rational growth of energy demand,” it stated.
Xie pointed out that China’s per capita emissions of its 1.3 billion people remain much lower than rich countries’ and about a fifth of the US average per person.
He also said about a fifth of the country’s emissions came from making goods for export and called on consumer nations to shoulder some responsibility for this.
“Developed countries should be responsible for their accumulative emissions and current high per-capita emissions, and take the lead in reducing emissions, in addition to providing financial support and transferring technologies to developing countries,” the paper said.
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