According to the Times, this new revelation will make it harder for those trying to reduce smog in China and greenhouse gases around the world.
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China’s emissions agreement with the US was greeted as significant because it was the first such agreement China had made.
Song adds that he has direct confirmation from the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change secretariat, the body responsible for the Paris talks, that its most recent “synthesis report”-a document that outlines how much greenhouse gas pollution countries are willing to cut in the lead-up to Paris, released at the end of October-incorporates the most recent Chinese data”.
“The news that China’s government is already backing away from its commitment, before the Paris talks even begin, should come as no surprise”, he said. Mitch McConnell (R-KY), a vocal opponent of an worldwide climate deal, told the Washington Examiner. For more than a decade, China has been undercounting the amount of coal it has been burning – and not just by trivial amounts either. There will always be USA elected officials who seek to protect special interests, but they are fighting an irreversible trend, and they should be focused on helping workers from the coal industry find new opportunities.
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China has been underreporting its coal consumption for years, experts said Wednesday, November 4, after reports that official statistics have been revised upwards by hundreds of millions of tonnes a year. “I don’t think this will have any impact on the negotiations side just because it’s already been understood and discussed”. Other countries will need to exceed their pledges as well – and the United States can set the pace by continuing to showcase a speedy coal phase-out. And as a result, it’s been emitting a billion tons more Carbon dioxide a year than it had admitted. They reveal that the quantities of coal being burned in the country have been underestimated since 2000.
China’s National Bureau of Statistics did not immediately confirm the report. That’s because provinces have an incentive to over-report consumption as an indicator of economic growth.
“In general, it’s a pretty messy picture”, Li said. He notes that China is a large developing country with less sophisticated emissions accounting systems compared to industrialized nations like the US and European Union.
The United States’ power sector is on track to hit a 20-year low in carbon dioxide emissions, thanks largely to massive numbers of coal power plant closures, an environmental group said.
Li described it as a tale of two statistics.
The above chart shows various scenarios for coal.
“We will see another decline this year”, he said.
So how do we account for the difference between the EIA’s 14 percent, and the New York Times’s 17 percent rise?
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However, China has since changed its position, and is on board with the concept of an worldwide mechanism for measuring progress toward achieving emissions-reduction goals under a new agreement.
