Beijing’s policies stifle bid to lead climate movement
BEIJING — Presidentelect Donald Trump has called climate change a hoax created by China and said he would cancel an international accord to curb greenhouse gas emissions. But leaders of other nations, including China, are rolling up their sleeves for the hard work of putting that deal into practice.
The accord, an ambitious global effort signed in 2015 and known as the Paris agreement, rests on a foundation of transparency and good faith: Countries are supposed to report and submit for verification their carbon emissions data. Without accurate and timely reporting, there is no way to monitor progress and adjust policies.
China, the world’s biggest polluter, has refused to accept international monitoring of its emissions and says it will provide data to outside observers. In the past, conflicting data about the country’s energy use has raised questions about accuracy.
To take on a leadership role to promote the Paris agreement, as China has indicated it wants to do, Beijing will have to be more transparent on emissions. What exactly would it have to do?
The work of creating an international “transparency regime” has already begun. At a summit meeting in Marrakesh, Morocco, in November, officials discussed a plan to establish standards and mechanisms for reporting. Over the next two years, negotiators will engage in “the most technically complex and politically contentious issues,” said Li Shuo, a Beijing-based climate policy analyst at Greenpeace East Asia.
But China, he said, “still has a long way to improve its transparency system.”
International negotiators are expected to draw up standards that will apply to both developed and developing countries, unlike the bifurcated reporting requirements of older climate deals. This means that China and India will be compelled to provide the same kinds of information that, say, France and Japan do.
A country’s greenhouse-gas output is determined by extrapolating data about energy use rather than directly measuring it. Accurate annual coal consumption statistics are critical for these calculations because industrial coal burning is the biggest source of greenhouse-gas pollution.
But China’s coal statistics are subject to official corrections and changes, and updates are released just once every five years, when the country conducts an economic census.
The last census revealed that China’s coalderived energy use was 12 to 14 percent higher than previous estimates for every year since 2005. Furthermore, there are persistent differences between coal consumption statistics reported on the provincial and national levels.
“Over time, it would be desirable if the reporting systems are improved,” said Glen Peters, a scientist at the Center for International Climate and Environmental Research-Oslo. “The fact that the census leads to 10 percent revisions in such an important commodity is a little worrying.”
“The U.S., for example, also has revisions, but generally less than 1 percent in the first year and maybe 0.1 percent in following years,” he said.
Another problem is that China has been reluctant to release its own calculations of emissions, so other nations rely on calculations made by foreign scientists.
There is “no good reason” China is dragging its feet, said Li, the Greenpeace analyst.