Beijing likes to style itself as some sort of climate champion (it’s good marketing for the “green” technology it sells), and so do its admirers in climateworld.
Thus, on May 14, the U.N.’s climate chief, Simon Stiell, was speaking in China. Among the lines in his hymn to the Beijing regime was this:
We know that China has a record not of just meeting, but exceeding, its targets.
Sometimes creatively so.
And so, via The Financial Times, May 25:
Under Beijing’s revised calculation for carbon intensity — the measure for the amount of CO₂ per unit of economic output — emissions in the world’s second-biggest economy rose 7 per cent from 2020 to 2025, said the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air, a European think-tank.
The figure is half the rise indicated previously, a gap which amounts to around 700mn tonnes of carbon, or the same amount emitted annually by major manufacturing economies such as Germany and South Korea.
At present, China is not on track to meet its goal of carbon neutrality by 2060 in large part because of its rise in coal use to meet its demands, despite world-beating efforts to electrify energy and transport…
Data released by Beijing relating to China’s economy are well known for their lack of clarity and, often enough, lack of existence.
And thus the FT’s Edward White can only note that it “appears” that China is now “excluding non-energy uses of fossil fuels. “
Convenient!