After surprising the world late last year by announcing an ambitious pledge with the U.S. to fight climate change, China’s finally come forward with the specifics of how it’s going to pull it off.
The world’s single-largest emitter of greenhouse gases released the details of its climate pledge to the U.N. As promised, it intends to reach peak emissions by 2030 — although it “will work hard” to do so even earlier — while aiming to reduce its CO2 emissions by 60 to 65 percent below 2005 levels. And to get there, it plans to regrow forests and up the proportion of “non-fossil fuels in its primary energy consumption” to about 20 percent, also by that time.
That’s a lot to pull off in the next 15 years. Greenpeace’s Energy Desk ran the numbers, and found that, assuming China succeeds meets the high end of its target for 2020 reductions, it will have to cut carbon intensity (the amount of CO2 emitted per unit of energy consumed) by 3.1 percent annually throughout the 2020s in order to reach the 60 percent target, and by 4.4 percent to reach its more ambitious goal.
But, many are pointing out, the country’s already well on its way to doing just that. Its coal consumption declined for the first time last year, bringing an accompanying decline in emissions, and that trend is continuing this year.
Jennifer Morgan, the global climate director at the World Resources Institute, called the pledge ”serious and credible.”
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