China, the world’s largest carbon emitter, has been dramatically underreporting the amount of coal it consumes each year, it has been claimed ahead of key climate talks in Paris.
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The global Energy Agency (IEA) has published detailed analysis of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from fuel combustion, less than four weeks before the start of the COP21 United Nations negotiations on climate change in Paris.
But in the latest edition, the same number for the same year was given as 4.12 billion tons – a rise of nearly 600 million tons, or almost 17 percent.
The increase was equivalent to over 70 percent of the United States’ annual coal consumption, said the New York Times, which first reported the changes.
Li Shuo, the senior climate and energy policy officer for Greenpeace East Asia, said the revised data suggested a gap between official statistics and what was happening on the ground.
The new figures have further substantiated the causes behind China’s staggeringly poor air quality. The correction for coal use in electric power generation was much smaller. “It’s created a lot of bewilderment”, he said.
But from the beginning, Republican lawmakers warned China could not be trusted to replace cheap fossil fuels with costly green energy.
After China made its commitment to tackle global warming a year ago, analysts predicted it was on track to peak emissions before 2030, but that was based on the old coal-use data. “Our basic data will have to be adjusted, and the worldwide agencies will also have to adjust their databases”. China’s coal use has been underestimated since 2000, according to the Times.
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Revised coal statistics, however, make it less likely China will be able to live up to its pledge of peaking emissions by 2030. So if China’s emissions have been much greater than believed, researchers will want to understand where the extra carbon dioxide output ended up – for example, how it might have been absorbed in natural “sinks” like forests or oceans, said Josep G. Canadell, executive director of the Global Carbon Project, which studies the sources and flows of greenhouse-gas pollution. China in that time more than tripled its per-capita emissions, while the United States saw a 16 percent decrease in emissions per-capita. “China does have huge carbon emissions but if we look forward China’s emissions will soon peak and begin to fall”.
