![]() ![]() Some municipal water pumping stations have been forced to halt operations in northeastern China. Elevators have been turned off in low-rise buildings in southeastern China. ![]() Producing these two materials accounts for about a quarter of China’s carbon emissions.Īn electricity shortage has temporarily shut down thousands of factories in the past two weeks. The biggest driver of China’s emissions, however, is its insatiable appetite for steel and cement, key ingredients for apartment towers, bullet train lines, subways and other large construction projects. The global reliance on China for exercise equipment, air-conditioners and other products has spiked as economies reopen 19 months after the coronavirus pandemic began. China has a fifth of the world’s population but produces a third of the world’s factory goods. Separately, the Biden administration has been upset with China for threatening to withhold cooperation on climate change if the United States continues to challenge Beijing on human rights and other issues.Ĭhina’s remarkable growth in energy consumption is fueled by its manufacturing sector. Lewis, an expert in Chinese climate policy at Georgetown University. is in a position to tell them what to do,” said Joanna I. That decision essentially stopped climate progress by the United States for four years. Trump in 2017 withdrew the United States from the Paris agreement, the pact among nations to fight climate change. ![]() That’s because former President Donald J. The United States has released more human-generated carbon dioxide over the past century than any other country, although China is the biggest current emitter now by a wide margin and catching up fast in cumulative emissions.Ĭhina also resents pressure from the Biden administration to step up its climate ambition. Europe’s energy use was gradually declining even before the pandemic.Ĭhina is among the few countries that have not yet agreed on the 1.5 degree goal.Ĭomplicating matters is China’s view that climate change is primarily an American responsibility. American energy use was nearly flat over the decade before the pandemic and then fell sharply last year. The United States and Europe have been able to reduce emissions more easily because their economies have been growing slowly. “The renewable capacity additions are still not keeping up with demand growth” for electricity, said David Fishman, an energy analyst at the Lantau Group, a Hong Kong consultancy. While China has mostly run out of rivers to dam for hydroelectric power, it has been building solar power and wind power faster than any other country in recent years. China is the world leader in hydroelectric power, in solar power and in wind power. Each year, China burns more coal than the rest of the world combined and almost as much oil as the United States.īut it is also making heavy investments in clean energy. Over the past three decades, China’s growth in energy use has been explosive. 1 emitter, continuing to grow in those emissions over the next 10 years?” Mr. “Can the world afford to have China, as already the No. But climate scientists warn that nations must make a sharp turn away from fossil fuels now, in order to avert the most catastrophic consequences of climate change. Xi Jinping, China’s top leader, has promised his country will start reducing carbon dioxide and other gases generated by burning coal, gas and oil by 2030 and then stop adding them to the atmosphere altogether by 2060. ![]() And its voracious appetite for electricity is only growing. China burns more fossil fuels than any other nation, making it the planet’s top source of the greenhouse gases that are warming the Earth. This archipelago of power plants underlines an unsettling reality in the global fight to slow climate change. It’s one of several huge gas-fired plants being built to pump more electricity throughout this sprawling industrial city of about 10 million, where rising demand for power has led to rationing and blackouts that are now rippling across eastern China and threaten international supply chains. DONGGUAN, China - On the northern edge of a vast Chinese factory city, welding torches gleam as workers finish construction on a gas-fired power plant to replace one that burned coal and blanketed the surrounding neighborhood in a sooty pall. ![]()
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