Can China be trusted on climate change claims?

Pollution in China

At the recent UN summit in New York, China announced it is to increase efforts to improve energy efficiency and curb the rise in CO2 emissions, in a bid to save our somewhat diminishing planet. President Hu Jintao insists China will seriously try and prevent carbon emissions growing as fast as their economy. However, Hu was reluctant to disclose any figures or exact targets, prompting the world's other major carbon producer, the US, to call for figures to be released in order to make the proposals more helpful. The fact that China are refusing to give data suggests they cannot be trusted on their promises to make drastic changes to their energy policies.

This isn't the first time that questions have been raised over the announcement of Chinese energy plans. At a conference two years ago, China invited the world's leaders to attend a talk focused on "Green China", in response to the news that China had become the world's biggest emitter of GHGs. But on the conference's final day, President Hu Jintao talked about China's commitment to economic reform and maintaining their extraordinary economic growth. Little was actually said about climate change, leaving the audience, which included then US Secretary of State Colin Powell, slightly baffled.

At the latest summit, the Chinese president said his country would curb its carbon emissions per unit of GDP, a measure also known as carbon intensity, by a "notable margin" by 2020 from the 2005 level. However, the proposal is unlikely to mean an overall reduction in emissions, as China's economy is expected to continue to grow rapidly. But there has never been a more crucial time for China to actively and substantially combat climate change. With 1.3 billion people getting to grips with the higher living standards that industrialisation and market economics bring, they have only recently started to pump significant levels CO2 into the atmosphere, but it is already the number one emitter of pollution.

Hu's vagueness over China's plans raises suspicion. Indeed, China's energy efficiency has improved in each of the past two years and is likely to continue, because a huge surge in investment in energy-intensive industries like steel and cement in the early part of this decade has run its course. And they do have a rapidly expanding renewable energy sector that is now the world's largest.

However, they are still investing extremely heavily in coal-fired electricity plants, the primary source of CO2 emissions, to meet its surging power demands. This year, of the 80 to 100 gigawatts of capacity it adds to its electricity grid, 75 to 80 percent will be produced from coal.

China rely so heavily on fossil fuels for their energy that curbing emissions will be very difficult, and whereas they might not be ignoring the need for climate change, they are moving, and will continue to move, at their own pace. They are not in the climate change debate to bargain with anyone. When Beijing says its carbon emissions won't begin to go down until 2050, they mean it, and there's nothing the US or Europe can do about it.

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