But China’s carbon dioxide emissions estimates have generally been unreliable which have complicated efforts to impose a cap-and-trade system.
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In the weeks before one of the world’s biggest climate change get-togethers is set to kick off in Paris, the globe’s biggest carbon emitter, China, has quietly released updated figures suggesting that it may have been underreporting its coal consumption by up to 600 million tons annually for several years.
While the NBS did not immediately comment on the reporting variation, an adviser to China’s top planning body, the National Development and Reform Commission, said at a Beijing coal forum that previous data did not account for a few provincial statistics, which had been left out of the official national data that was gathered.
The above chart highlights the Bloomberg New Energy Finance forecasts that China will see “net closure” of coal capacity starting around 2020.
Forty percent of the 400 gigawatts in generation capacity to be added in Southeast Asia by 2040 will be coal-fired, the IEA says.
On a per-capita basis, however, China’s emissions were just over two fifths of those of the United States, though the countries are moving in opposite directions, as the new IEA data find that U.S. per-capita emissions fell 16% from 1990 while China’s tripled as its gross domestic product per capita surged.
Figures as far back as 2000 were changed, according to comparisons by AFP of different editions of the China Statistical Yearbook, published by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS).
Growth in coal use is expected to hit liquefied natural gas (LNG) producers hardest, especially with prices half of year-ago levels as Australia and North America wind up their spending spree of hundreds of billions of dollars.
The data has depended on incomplete provincial statistics, he said. Even though it won’t change estimates of the amount of Carbon dioxide in the air (which is measured directly), the revelation may explain inconsistencies that have been puzzling scientists about China’s coal use, energy consumption, and air quality for years.
But Li predicted China – which has pledged to hit “peak emissions” and make 20 percent of its energy mix renewable by 2030 – would play a more constructive role in Paris. “Our basic data will have to be adjusted, and the worldwide agencies will also have to adjust their databases”, said Lin Boqiang, director of the China Center for Energy Economics Research at Xiamen University.
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The energy industry is easing away from coal and will keep moving in that direction regardless of what happens at the United Nations climate talks in Paris next month. “China does have huge carbon emissions but if we look forward China’s emissions will soon peak and begin to fall”. But Yang said that conclusion had been disputed.
