‘It’s good news’: Scientists suspect history about to be made in China
The world’s economy is growing. China’s economy is growing. Yet greenhouse gas emissions appear to have peaked. Scientists suspect history is about to be made.
In a story by the Sydney Morning Herald, reporter Nick O’Malley says that for months, reports came in and climate scientists and analysts pored over the latest global greenhouse gas emissions data. Something unfamiliar was happening. It looked a little like good news. Perhaps even something of profound historical significance.
Lauri Myllyvirta, senior fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute and lead analyst at the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air, was among the first to go public with analysis showing that China’s emissions might have actually peaked despite the country’s economy growing.
In November last year, Myllyvirta wrote that despite the post-COVID surge in emissions, China’s massive deployment of wind and solar energy, growth in EVs and an end to a drought that had cut hydroelectricity generation had caused the country’s emissions to tumble.
“A 2023 peak in China’s CO2 emissions is possible if the build-out of clean energy sources is kept at the record levels seen last year,” he wrote in an analysis for Carbon Brief based on official figures and commercial data. Largely as a result of China’s green surge, global investment in renewable technology in 2023 outstripped that in fossil fuels for the first time, the International Energy Agency reported.
To Myllyvirta, this is a critical point. Under the Paris Agreement, each nation must keep updating its targets to make them more ambitious. These are known as “nationally determined contributions,” and the next round is due at the start of next year. Given its boom in renewables, Myllyvirta now believes China is in a position to ramp up its future targets.
This, he says, would make China’s goal of reaching net zero by 2060 credible and achievable. And that would give the world a greater chance of stabilising the climate somewhere near the Paris targets.
“It’s good news,” says Bill Hare, a leading climate scientist and chief executive of Climate Analytics, a nonprofit research and policy organisation, when asked about the emissions figures. “We are still looking at the numbers from last year, but I think it is happening. If we have peaked in emissions from fossil fuels, and I think we have, this is a historic moment.”
For an optimistic read of Myllyvirta’s findings, read the details via Carbon Brief.
