Will China’s changing energy and environmental policies save the planet?
- In her new book, Barbara Finamore takes an optimistic view of China’s energy transition and its potential for the world
- However, she downplays the environmental costs of the Belt and Road Initiative and the role of ordinary citizens in change
Will China Save the Planet?, by Barbara Finamore. Published by Polity
As oceans warm and ice caps melt, it is hard to be optimistic about slowing, let alone stopping, global warming. Barbara Finamore nonetheless finds reason for optimism in her authoritative look at China’s unfolding energy transition.
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China burns half the world’s coal. It is the world’s largest carbon emitter, overtaking the US despite a smaller economy. China is an energy hog, partly because of its continuing reliance on heavy industry and party because low prices encourage waste. So it is possible for China to do much better just by improving efficiency – relatively low-hanging fruit.
The beginning of a remarkable change in China’s energy and environmental policy has been evident for five years. Presidents Xi Jinping and Barack Obama signed a landmark climate partnership in 2014. China stepped out of the shadows to take a leadership role at the 2015 Paris climate talks that led to a path-breaking global agreement.
China’s internal plans call for increased renewable energy, part of a pledge to source 20 per cent of energy from non-fossil sources by 2030. China has said that carbon emissions will peak around 2030, hopefully earlier, and that carbon intensity – carbon emissions divided by GDP – will be reduced by 60 per cent to 65 per cent below 2005 levels by that date.
Already, coal use seems to have levelled off. Coal is the largest source of air pollution in China, killing more than 700,000 people prematurely each year. China’s coal burning is the world’s largest source of CO2 emissions. So China has plenty of reason to want to clean up: both to stop killing its own people with air pollution and to forestall the worst effects of the increasingly severe floods and droughts that come with climate change
Finamore, a lawyer and the senior strategic director for Asia at the Natural Resources Defence Council (NRDC) environmental charity, has focused her work on China for 30 years. In 1996, she founded the NRDC’s China programme and the NRDC was the first foreign charity to start a clean-energy programme for China. An early green building that she was involved with proved so successful at cutting energy use that local officials put locked cages around the electricity meters to prevent what they believed was unauthorised tampering.
Finamore has thus been in a unique position to watch the development of China’s policies at a time of extraordinary economic transformation and equally stunning environmental degradation. Her experience makes this short book both authoritative and comprehensive, an excellent summary of current policies and research. If you want to read one book on China’s energy and environmental transformation, Finamore’s lucid volume is the one.
Her assessment is very much of the glass-half-full variety. She deftly outlines policies and aspirations but understates the continuing power of the coal industry, ranging from miners to electric utility operators. Her brief discussion of China’s carbon trading efforts is revealing in its brevity; this much-vaunted programme has been delayed and scaled back and is unlikely to be the sort of success the Chinese government and Western environmentalists had hoped. The environmental costs of the Belt and Road Initiative are similarly downplayed.
There is also a notable reticence to discuss the role of charities and ordinary citizens. This is perhaps a sign of tightening political constraints. The discussion of Beijing’s “airpocalypse” and the citizen outcry that has followed makes no mention of the searing documentary Under the Dome, which was downloaded some 300 million times in China before government censors stepped in.
While it is important to note, as Finamore does, the impressive green-building targets of the current five-year plan, effective policies on buildings’ energy efficiency need bottom-up enthusiasm from everyone – from construction workers to building maintenance staff. Citizen movements everywhere have played a powerful role in pushing governments toward greener policies.
It is very much an open question as to whether authoritarianism with Chinese characteristics can engineer a significantly less carbon-intensive economy. Xi Jinping talks about “ecological civilisation”, but what does this really mean in an economy addicted to high growth?
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There is not much time to come up with a convincing answer. The speed of China’s change in the past five years has surprised everyone. So, too, has the acceleration of global warming, and previously unimaginable weather is becoming the new normal. We all need to hope that Finamore’s optimism is well-founded.
Asian Review of Books
