Shoulder to the wheel on climate
In its latest commitment to tackling the climate crisis, China has pledged to end all financing of coal-fired power plants in other countries, and experts say the world’s largest developing country deserves credit for its efforts in tackling climate change, and all countries should shoulder more responsibility to cut global emissions.
At the United Nations General Assembly in September, President Xi Jinping said: “China will step up support for other developing countries in developing green and low-carbon energy, and will not build new coal-fired power projects abroad.”
Robert Lawrence Kuhn, a China expert and chairman of the Kuhn Foundation, said the Global Development Initiative Xi proposed in his UN speech encourages positive forces.
Such commitment “puts climate change theory into real world practice by reducing greenhouse gases, an action step unmatched by the fine rhetoric of others”, Xinhua News Agency quoted Kuhn as saying.
In the run-up to the 26th United Nations Climate Change Conference of the Parties that was held in Glasgow from Oct 31 to Nov 12, the State Council published its plan detailing how China will reach peak carbon dioxide emissions by 2030.
Under the plan, the share of non-fossil energy consumption by 2030 would amount to 25 percent, and CO2 emissions per unit of GDP would fall by more than 65 percent compared with 2005 levels. By 2030, 40 percent of new vehicles would be powered by clean energy.
China has reaffirmed that its CO2 emissions will reach a peak before 2030 and that carbon neutrality will be achieved by 2060. The government has also integrated the goal into the country’s wider environmental plans.
Neil Hirst, a senior policy fellow at the Grantham Institute for Climate Change and the Environment at Imperial College London, said: “China has made some very considerable contributions to the climate effort, and its more recent announcement of carbon neutrality by 2060 is a bold step that also had a big international impact.”
China’s rapid economic growth has created room for large investment in new energy, experts say.
According to a white paper released by the State Council in October, the total installed capacity of non-fossil energy power generation in China reached 980 million kW by 2020, accounting for 44.7 percent of total installed capacity. Compared with 2005, the installed capacity for solar energy grew over 3,000 times and for wind energy it grew 200 times, the white paper stated.
Byford Tsang, a senior policy adviser with the climate change think tank E3G, said: “Developed countries do shoulder a bigger share of responsibility to address climate change, ... developing nations should also avoid ‘locking-in’ their power systems with fossil fuels, such as coal, as greener and cleaner alternatives become more widely available.”