![]() ![]() By putting a price on carbon emissions, a marketplace to trade emissions allowances could accomplish the task-even if it might cause heartburn for many coal companies and investors. But even at their current dizzying pace of cost reductions, wind and solar power alone would not drive coal off the grid fast enough. China has no carbon tax, and to date its carbon reduction efforts have focused largely on the rapid buildout of renewable energy infrastructure. The emissions trading scheme could play a starring role in this effort. Such was the scene when Xi Jinping, China’s authoritarian-leaning president, unexpectedly threw down the gauntlet in September 2020, vowing that China’s emissions would peak by 2030 and fall to net zero by 2060. “Things are only getting worse,” observed Craig Hart, director of the Pace Energy and Climate Center at the Elisabeth Haub School of Law. As of last year China had under construction or in various planning stages more coal-fired capacity- an estimated 249.6 gigawatts-than the current total capacity of either the U.S. Yet its appetite for coal is only growing. Thanks in large part to this deep dependence on coal, China’s per capita carbon emissions now exceed that of most countries in Western Europe. ![]() ![]() Its power sector, which generates more than half of its electricity from burning coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel, accounts for the biggest share of the country’s emissions, roughly a third. Is the world’s largest emissions trading scheme a fearsome tool to defang China’s coal economy, or a vast paper-pushing operation? “Things are only getting worse”Ĭhina is now by far the biggest emitter of greenhouse gases on the planet, pumping more than 10 gigatonnes of planet-warming carbon into the atmosphere every year, or around 30 percent of the world’s total. ![]()
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