China Signals It’s Not Joining Pledge to Cut Methane Emissions
China Signals It’s Not Joining Pledge to Cut Methane Emissions
(Bloomberg) -- China signaled it’s unlikely to join a global pledge to cut methane emissions, and said it’s already doing enough to reduce greenhouse gases.
“The U.S keeps telling people to join it for new pledges but without giving solutions about how to” tackle methane, said Wang Yi, a senior Chinese negotiator at COP26. “Young people say there’s a lot of blah, blah, blah here, which to some degree is true,” he said, referring to comments from climate activist Greta Thunberg.
China’s absence from two agreements to come out of last week’s global leaders summit at COP26 -- slashing emissions of the super-potent greenhouse gas methane and reducing funding for overseas fossil fuel projects -- makes those deals weaker. President Xi Jinping hasn’t attended the conference, a move that was criticized by U.S. President Joe Biden.
China, however, sees its climate pledges made before the UN summit kicked off as the most dramatic reduction it’s ever attempted, and says other countries shouldn’t demand more. Xie Zhenhua, special envoy for climate change, reiterated on Wednesday that the country plans to unveil a detailed roadmap for reaching net-zero emissions by 2060, and said it was focused on implementing its decarbonization measures.
“The key to tackling the climate crisis is cooperation,” he said. Countries need to have “clear timelines and clear action pans, otherwise it’s just empty slogans.”
Reducing methane in the air is seen as the biggest single thing governments can do to keep alive the goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. U.S. climate envoy John Kerry said this week that he’d been up until 3 a.m. working with Russia and China to participate in the methane pledge.
Big Contributor
China is a big contributor of the gas. While it’s easier to cut emissions from energy operations by preventing leaks and maintaining efficiency, it’s much more difficult to do so from agriculture. A large methane plume was spotted by satellite near a natural gas line in northeast China last month.
Still, Wang, the senior negotiator, sees a global deal to tackle climate change emerging from COP26. He was “very optimistic” about ongoing negotiations, including agreements on rules for a worldwide carbon market mechanism under Article 6 of the Paris Agreement.
China’s energy consumption in 2060 will be at current levels despite a fourfold rise in GDP, the Institute of Chinese Academy of Macroeconomic Research, which is associated with the country’s top economic planner, said in a report Wednesday. The electrification rate will increase from 27% in 2020 to 74% in 40 years time if China stays on its path of peaking carbon emissions by 2030 and achieving net-zero by 2060.
The report also showed that the share of non-fossil fuel energy in China’s consumption will grow from about 16% in 2020 to almost 97% in 2060, higher than the 80% target in China’s official roadmap launched in October.
“We need to be realistic, to be pragmatic,” lead negotiator Xie said last week, according to state news agency Xinhua. China’s plans are “already ambitious,” he said.
©2021 Bloomberg L.P.
With assistance from Bloomberg