Coal Fighter Leslie Glustrom sends me the powerpoint slide above.
Climate change could have a “huge impact” on China, reducing crop yields and harming the environment, the country’s top weather scientist has warned, in a rare official admission.
Zheng Guogang told Xinhua news agency that climate change could be a “serious threat” to big infrastructure projects.
Mr Zheng, the head of China’s meteorological administration, said warming temperatures exposed his country to a growing “risk of climate change and climate disasters”.
He said temperature rises in China had already been higher than the global average for the past century.
These are rare admissions from a Chinese official, BBC Asia analyst Michael Bristow says.
China’s leaders have acknowledged the damage from global warming but they usually do not lay out the full scale of the problems.
Perhaps I should cross my fingers before writing this, but it just may be that we have slipped, virtually without noticing, past a landmark in environmental and industrial history. Preliminary figures suggest that last year, for the first time, global emissions of carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels failed to rise despite economic growth. Even more surprisingly, emissions seem to have fallen in China.
If confirmed, these developments – only recently thought beyond the bounds of practical possibility – would provide the most hopeful sign yet that the world may get to grips with climate change before it becomes too dangerous. They indicate that the traditional link between carbon emissions and economic growth can be broken.
Last week the International Energy Agency provisionally reported that global emissions were 32.3 billion tonnes in 2014, the same as the year before. These have failed to rise only three times before in the past 40 years, on each occasion because of bad economic times. In the early 1980s, there was a US recession; in 1992, the Soviet Union had just collapsed; in 2009, there was a financial crisis. Last year, by contrast, the global economy grew by 3 per cent.
More encouraging still, new estimates suggest that Chinese emissions – a quarter of the total – dropped by 2 per cent, despite a 7.4 per cent growth in GDP.
It is hard to overstate the sense of what the agency calls “very welcome surprise”. Only weeks ago warnings that emissions would have to peak this decade to avoid catastrophic global warming seemed impossible to satisfy. And a Chinese announcement last autumn that it would stop the pollution increasing by 2030, as part of an agreement with the US, was widely dismissed as an insincere pipe dream.
Of course, one year’s measurements – even if confirmed – do not signify a trend: the likelihood must be that there will be some growth in future. But there are good grounds for believing, as Fatih Birol, the agency’s chief economist, puts it, that “for the first time, greenhouse gas emissions are decoupling from economic growth”.
Beijing, where pollution averaged more than twice China’s national standard last year, will close the last of its four major coal-fired power plants next year.
The capital city will shutter China Huaneng Group Corp.’s 845-megawatt power plant in 2016, after last week closing plants owned by Guohua Electric Power Corp. and Beijing Energy Investment Holding Co., according to a statement Monday on the website of the city’s economic planning agency. A fourth major power plant, owned by China Datang Corp., was shut last year.
The facilities will be replaced by four gas-fired stations with capacity to supply 2.6 times more electricity than the coal plants.
The closures are part of a broader trend in China, which is the world’s biggest carbon emitter. Facing pressure at home and abroad, policy makers are racing to address the environmental damage seen as a byproduct of breakneck economic growth. Beijing plans to cut annual coal consumption by 13 million metric tons by 2017 from the 2012 level in a bid to slash the concentration of pollutants.
In a blink, trillions of dollars in investments become worthless. Stock markets reel as banks play “hot potato” with once-lucrative assets they now can’t unload quickly enough. The price of crude has collapsed, and now every financial product buoyed by oil – every share of ExxonMobil, every corporate bond taken out to fund drilling, every derivative on the price of crude 12 months hence – is barely worth the paper it’s printed on. One too-big-to-fail firm, unable to stanch the bleeding, declares bankruptcy. Again, the financial system teeters on the edge of collapse.
This is the nightmare financial scenario presaged by the end of the oil market. By now, the science is clear: Averting catastrophic climate change will mean dramatically slashing fossil fuel use. But when you compare the amount of known oil in the ground with how much carbon human activity can reasonably emit before warming becomes irreversible, you’re left with $20 trillion in fossil fuel investments that would need to stay effectively buried. How could the financial system weather that shock?
Recently, The Bank of England formally took up the question in its latest research agenda. It is the first time a central bank of its size has examined the systemic risks of stranded assets – the oil, gas and coal that must go untapped if the world acts on its climate goals.
Now that the Bank of England is investigating the financial threats that climate change poses, will the U.S. Federal Reserve follow suit?
On a gloomier note, the recent drop in the price of oil is starting to boost consumption (part of the intention?), at least here in the UK. Further, the lower cost of oil is having a knock-on effect on natural gas prices, which in turn makes renewables less competitive – especially as the subsidies available to producers are set with reference to the price of fossil fuel alternatives (ie the subsidy drops as the price gap grows). This is creating a headwind of renewables (no pun intended), on top of hostile policy changes from the government. (Of course, if the full impact cost of fossil fuels were taken into account, the numbers would look very different, but sadly they are not)
Politicians have in the past sold renewable energy on its secondary merits – ie its security and price stability. They have undersold its primary merit: that it is carbon free. The assumption was that renewables would gradually ease out fossil fuels as the latter became ever more expensive. With the world now awash with oil (and likely to remain so for some years ahead) , that approach now looks naive. Peak oil will not come to the rescue of the climate. Like coal, there is more than enough of the stuff still in the ground to fry the planet. We just have to be sensible enough not to burn it. Period.
On the other hand, lower fossil fuel prices should make it less painful, and therefore politically easier, to introduce carbon taxes, which would reflect the wider social and environmental costs involved.