Last year, China's leader Xi Jinping
made a historic pledge
to fight global warming.
China will strive to peak
carbon dioxide emissions before 2030
and achieve carbon neutrality before 2060.
But what do those
commitments actually mean?
First, let's consider the magnitude
of these pledges.
They call for domestic climate actions
at an unprecedented speed and scale.
Due to the size of China,
they will also matter globally.
China is as large as the US,
with four times the population.
With double-digit annual economic growth
in the past 40 years,
China has become the world's
second-largest economy in 2010.
And the story of China
being the world's largest emitter
is a fairly recent one.
When I was born,
and you can see I'm not that old,
the emissions in China
were only half those of the US.
It only became the largest
about 15 years ago.
In 2019, China represents 28 percent
of global CO2 emissions.
Its emissions are so significant today
that going net-zero before 2060
could prevent 0.2 to 0.3-degrees
of global warming
and bring down 215 billion tons
of CO2 emissions in the next 40 years.
And that is equivalent
to its cumulative emissions
in the past half century.
So why does China emit so much?
The phenomenal economic growth in China,
like in many developed countries,
was primarily driven by fossil fuels.
In 2020,
84 percent of China’s primary energy
consumption came from fossil fuels.
The thirst for energy has made it
the world's largest coal consumer,
the second-largest oil consumer
and the single largest contributor
to the growth in demand for gas.
But there's another side to the story.
In the past decade,
China has also seen the world's fastest
and the largest deployment
of almost anything clean,
green and low-carbon.
And that includes a long list
of number ones
in the field of non-fossil energy,
low-carbon transportation,
green buildings and you just name it.
In July 2021, China launched the world's
largest emissions-trading scheme.
The single act has now put a carbon price
to 12 percent of global CO2 emissions.
China is also the largest producer
and the processor
of a few critical minerals
used for clean-energy technologies.
It also manufactures the world's most
wind turbines and solar panels.
According to Cambridge Econometrics,
a UK-based consultancy,
the huge scale of investment
required for a net-zero China before 2060
could create a “positive spillover
effect” on other countries,
bringing down the cost of clean energy
all around the world.
And such an effect
has already been observed
in the cost of solar panels.
But the road to net-zero
will not be an easy one.
As China's leader Xi Jinping said himself,
China must make
"extraordinarily hard efforts."
One of the reasons is the “much shorter
time span,” as Xi put it.
China has pledged to peak its emissions
in the next nine years.
It's worth noting, however,
this is considered“highly insufficient”
by Climate Action Tracker,
an independent scientific analysis,
for the consistency of a three- to four-
degree warmer [planet].
China should also bring down
10 to 11 billion tons
of annual CO2 emissions at its peak level
to net-zero in about 30 years.
That's my age, by the way.
That would take the nations of the EU
about 60, 70 years.
However, unlike the EU,
China faces a dual challenge.
In 2020, there were 600 million
people living in China
with a monthly income
of about 140 US dollars or less.
China wants to become
a "great socialist modern country,"
which translates to continuous
urbanization and modernization.
Any tiny improvement
that lifts up the living standard
of an average Chinese person
must be multiplied by 1.4 billion.
And that could mean a lot more emissions.
Another challenge is transforming
the economic structure.
In 2020, 38 percent of China's GDP
came from the secondary industry.
Many of them are considered
as "liang gao" industries in China,
which means “dual high.”
That's high energy consumption
and high emissions.
These industries include coal power
and the manufacturing of iron and steel,
cement, aluminium,
chemicals, petrochemicals,
you know, the hard-to-abate
industries you've heard of.
And according to
the International Energy Agency,
the power and industry combined
add up to 84 percent
of the nation's total CO2 emissions.
For decades, China has been the so-called
“factory of the world.”
The emissions generated
from such production,
known as "embedded carbon,"
are calculated as domestic
emissions in China
rather than being ascribed to countries
that import Chinese-made products.
But regardless of all those challenges,
China has made its pledge.
So how can China get there?
China has pledged that it will not build
any [more] coal power plants abroad,
and it will start to phase out
coal consumption
starting from the 15th Five-Year period.
That's 2026 and onwards.
Its greening up the energy structure
and ramping up electrification.
According to experts
from Tsinghua University,
electricity can meet 79 percent of China's
final energy consumption by 2060,
if net-zero is achieved.
And that's almost triple today's level.
The industry sectors we just talked about
are also going through structural reform,
fuel switching and technology upgrades,
including starting pilots
such as hydrogen-fueled steelmaking
and the so-called negative
emissions technologies,
you're familiar with that, you know,
carbon capture or storage,
that type of thing.
And while China already has
the world's largest installed capacity
for wind and solar,
it has committed to double it
over the next nine years.
A high-level review compiled
by Energy Foundation China
on China's pathway
to two-degree and 1.5-degree
concludes that most of the scenarios
project China to peak its emissions
before the pledge deadline of 2030.
It could be even before 2025.
The city of Beijing has already
done that about 10 years ago.
And many high-emission provinces
have also shown a sign of a slowdown.
Experts such as Zou Ji,
a veteran environmental economist,
believe that, compared
to “Western countries,”
China can achieve its climate pledges
at a lower per-capita income
and more crucially,
a shorter plateau to its emissions peak
once it is achieved.
China’s leadership holds a clear view
that the country must move away
from the “GDP-oriented” pattern
that “pollutes, then treats,”
to what it calls
an “ecological civilization.”
Since 2010, China almost doubled
its GDP per capita
while largely maintaining a steady level
of emissions per capita.
And finally,
let me give you just one example
of how this vision is implemented.
In June 2021,
China decided to clamp down hard
on the power-hungry mining
of cryptocurrencies.
Half of the world's capacity
disappeared almost overnight.
Of course, to peak emissions
before 2030 at a lower level,
China must limit the unconstrained
development of the "liang gao" industries.
Recently, hundreds of such new projects
have been put on pause,
waiting for new assessments
on their impact on carbon emissions.
And the hope is that this type
of change will not be linear
but instead follow
a more exponential path.
As Zou Ji noted,
transformation might seem
slow in the beginning,
like turning around a giant ship.
But once the head is turned,
actions can accelerate
in the right direction
at an unprecedented speed.
Thank you.
(Applause)