In China’s new five-year plan, released Thursday, the world’s second-largest economy declared its aim to “lead global climate governance.” However, the targets laid out in the nation’s 15th five-year plan mark a cautious turn in China’s approach to energy strategy, reflecting the global cool-off on climate-related policy and a general sense of unease in energy markets.
China is set to continue full-speed ahead in its renewable energy additions, but is fundamentally changing the way that it tracks progress on emissions reduction. The new five-year plan marks an end to China’s energy intensity targets, which have guided the country’s measurement and evaluation of climate progress for years. This means that, going forward, “the pace of total emissions reductions will depend mostly on whether renewable energy deployment can keep pace with overall economic growth,” based on what Greenpeace told the nonpartisan news outlet Semafor.
However, the pace of renewable energy additions is set to remain high. The plan aims to replace 30 million metric tons of coal each year with renewable energy capacity. The plan also states that it aims to reach peak consumption of the dirtiest fossil fuel by 2030. At the same time, however, China has been greenlighting the development of new coal-fired capacity at the highest rate in over a decade.
“The 15th Five-Year Plan therefore highlights a central tension in China’s climate policy,” writes EnviroTec, “a world-leading renewable build-out occurring alongside continued fossil-fuel expansion, leaving uncertainty about whether emissions will begin a sustained decline before the 2030 peak target.”
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Overall, the cuts outlined in the new plan are not nearly ambitious enough to meet China’s pledges under the Paris agreement. In the legally binding pledges, China agreed to cut its carbon intensity by 65 percent from 2005 to 2030. The current plan would result in a cut of just 17 percent between now and 2030, but analysts calculate that China would need to achieve a 23 percent reduction over the next five years in order to meet its Paris commitment.
Li Shuo, director of the China Climate Hub at the Asia Society Policy Institute, told Climate Home News that the new watered down tone of China’s decarbonization goals “indicates a quiet recalibration, effectively acknowledging how difficult the goal has become.” It’s true that the final stretch to 2030 will be the hardest.
The lowest-hanging fruits of decarbonization have already been reached, and now the really tricky problems remain. “The focus increasingly shifts to more challenging areas – decarbonising hard-to-abate sectors, integrating a much larger share of renewables into the power system and building a more flexible and resilient electricity system,” Muyi Yang, a senior energy analyst for energy think tank Ember, recently told Reuters.
But while China’s softening of decarbonization ambitions is reflective of this harsh reality, it’s also reflective of politics – namely, a global easing of climate ambitions. With the world’s largest economy, the United States, turning its back on climate change completely, the pressure is off on a global scale to do the hard and dirty work of decarbonization.
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In February, the Trump administration dealt a death blow to emissions regulation in the United States when it formally revoked the 2009 “endangerment finding” that legally recognizes carbon emissions as a threat to public and environmental health. The Environmental Protection agency labeled the move as “the largest deregulatory action in American history.”
The revocation kneecaps the ability of legislators to regulate and set binding emissions targets. “The underlying scientific consensus remains unaltered, but the policies and actions against climate change have been effectively nullified—suggesting a swift and full retreat of the climate policy of the United States,” reports China U.S. Focus.
This retreat is a huge reflection of and driving factor in a global movement toward prioritizing energy security over energy sustainability. This pivot is only going to intensify in the new energy market chaos wrought by the United States’ war in Iran. Stranded supplies in the Gulf are already throwing Asian markets into a panic, and we can expect wartime priorities to shift climate goals to the back of the line.
By Haley Zaremba for Oilprice.com