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China’s Climate Policy Mythology
Chinese President Hu Jintao has announced plans to reduce China’s energy intensity of GDP by 20% from a 2005 baseline. Is this achievable, or is it just another climate policy myth?
Over to science policy analyst Roger Pielke Jr:
A few things stand out. One is that China’s energy intensity in 2008 is about the same as it was in 2001. Any claim that China’s energy intensity has improved by 20% over the past five years is incorrect. The second is that energy intensity has improved by only about 7.4% since 2005, meaning that it has a long way to go to reach a 20% target by 2010. Can it happen? Sure. But to say that China is “well on its way” does not square with the data. It would be “ironic” indeed if China has figured out how to grow its economy at 9% per year while increasing energy use by only 3% and decarbonizing its economy at an even lower amount. If this were true, then China would have discovered the holy grail of emissions reductions and we can all forget about the challenges of climate policy.
With all of the talk of China now being the “world leader” on emissions reductions, is this story just another myth of climate policy? It sure looks that way.
September 24th, 2009 at 8:19 pm
China is demonstrating ‘realpolitik’. They are making good money from the solar panel business, and presumably in due course from windmills or whatever other foolishness the western greenies are able to impose. The Chinese also stand to benefit from possible subsidies, and maybe even from the relative decline of the west as we become redder (under cover of green!) and more raddled with guilt, and they become richer and more amused by the day. Truly we need an anti-green uprising before they do us more harm. The fluctuations in climate have screwed up their global warming scam as far as any remaining vestige of scientific integrity is concerned (esp. the complete failure of the IPCC temperature forecasts), but the political lag is such that they are still getting mileage out of it. And some new bandwagon will be under development, given the astonishing success of this one, based on no more than woefully inadequate climate models programmed to exaggerate the effect of manmade CO2.