The second-biggest economy’s new 2060 target could be a game changer if concrete policies follow.
Read the full Risky Climate column at Bloomberg Green.
Talk is cheap. Action is hard. Cue the jokes about thousands of climate diplomats flying millions of miles to generate more hot air. Add to that President Donald Trump pulling the U.S. out of the Paris Agreement, Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro allowing rampant deforestation in the Amazon, and growing nationalist tendencies the world over, and it’s hard not to be cynical about the importance of climate diplomacy these days. (Full disclosure: my fleece jacket from the Copenhagen 2009 talks is keeping me warm as I write this, and I have enough swag from various climate talks to never have to bring an NPR tote bag to Whole Foods again.)
That makes President Xi Jinping’s declaration to the UN General Assembly this week that China plans to “achieve carbon neutrality before 2060” all the more surprising, and significant. By itself, it could lower projections of global average warming by 2100 by as much as 0.2 to 0.3°C.
China currently accounts for almost half of global coal demand and continues building coal-fired plants, but that era is quickly coming to an end – much quicker than Chinese officials themselves may have predicted only five years ago.
China’s latest commitment comes on top of a 2015 pledge to peak its emissions by 2030, a promise it only made after intense discussions between Beijing, Brussels, and especially Washington, earning President Barack Obama and his diplomatic efforts well-deserved credit at the time.
Beijing’s new target seems to have come despite current politics in Washington, not because of them. One possible interpretation is that China is banking on a Joe Biden presidency, and showing goodwill now ahead of a renewed focus on climate action in the U.S. The U.S. rejoining the Paris Agreement would only be a small part of this focus. Biden, for example, has proposed a $2 trillion green infrastructure investment plan. All that might well be part of China’s calculus, but supercharging its low-carbon efforts makes a lot of sense regardless. Xi’s carbon neutrality pledge, thus, is both good policy and good politics.
The winds are changing fast. The Economist did not even know about Xi’s pledge when it published its cover last week, along with a briefing that rightly emphasized the “changing geopolitics of energy.” Achieving carbon neutrality by 2060 will not be easy, but global power politics are certainly in China’s favor.
Continue reading at Bloomberg Green.