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1,215 articles matching the search query.
China leads the world in green energy, but it just can’t stop emitting greenhouse gasses
China is the world’s largest renewables generator and has cleaned the air in many cities, but it remains the world’s largest polluter, is addicted to coal, and is wasting solar panels on a massive scale.
This week on TikTok: Typhoon hits Beijing, China’s internet restrictions, and pickleball
Want more like this? Subscribe to The China Project’s official TikTok channel, The China Project, where Susan St.Denis explains complex topics about China clearly and simply in TikTok’s fast-evolving visual and verbal language.
This week on TikTok: Fighting climate change, imaginary universities, and China’s plan to reinvigorate the private sector
Want more like this? Subscribe to The China Project’s official TikTok channel, The China Project, where Susan St.Denis explains complex topics about China clearly and simply in TikTok’s fast-evolving visual and verbal language.
Climate cooperation or tech clash: America can’t decide
Sino-U.S. science and technology partnerships can help or hurt both sides, depending if you’re talking to the faithful or the fearful.
Africa’s debt isn’t mostly to China and many Beijing-financed projects are for clean energy
China is neither laying a debt trap nor building a lot of fossil projects in Africa. Rather, it’s been relatively generous with debt relief, and in developing Africa’s renewable energy capabilities, argues Kenyan economist Anzetse Were.
China’s plans for a summer of extreme downpours, floods, and heat waves
China is using artificial intelligence to forecast extreme weather events, but there is no relief in sight for a country that is particularly vulnerable to climate change.
Editor’s note for July 12, 2023
A note for Access newsletter readers from Jeremy Goldkorn.
A rare environmental success story: The Blue Map app and its 3.8 million Chinese users — Q&A with Ma Jun
This is a conversation with Ma Jun, author of China’s Water Crisis and founder of a leading non-governmental organization whose interactive Blue Map app has armed 3.8 million Chinese citizens with easy-to-interpret air- and water-pollution data to name and shame polluters. More amazingly, Ma has collaborated with multiple provincial governments that see the value of transparency.
China is providing the world a roadmap to an electrified future
Clean and affordable private transportation is the element missing from so many urban plans for more climate-friendly living. With its rail system, public transportation, and abundance of electric two-wheelers, China is offering the developing world a model for transitioning into clean energy.
China drafts new export controls to shore up solar dominance
China controls about 95% of manufacturing in critical solar technologies, and a new draft proposal might mean that some of the key building blocks to make solar panels will stay in China, raising the cost of green energy around the world.
The performative state of China’s environmental governance
Iza Ding, assistant professor of political science at the University of Pittsburgh, discusses how performative and substantive governance influence environmental protection efforts in China.
No breakthroughs, but China stays the course on climate goals
China most likely won’t change its climate goals at COP27, but it’s still leading in electric vehicle sales and renewable energy installations.
Melted shoes, cooked shrimp, and dried-up rivers: China’s record heat wave and drought in pictures and video
Since early July, much of China has been in the grip of a historic heat wave that has emptied rivers, forced cities to dim lights, and left people desperately searching for ways to cool down. This is what it looks like.
Auto supply chain hit as extreme heat causes power shortages in China
The whole world is suffering from extreme weather and China is no exception as droughts threaten hydropower and companies that depend on it, and floods and heat waves disrupt daily life and the economy.
Flash floods leave at least a dozen dead in China
Though summer floods are common in China, at least 12 people are dead and more are missing in Sichuan while more heat waves are predicted in other parts of the country.
Three tornadoes, record rainfall, and blistering heat waves raise climate alarm in China
Extreme weather has hit areas all around China in the past week, as Beijing forges on with new policies to reach its climate goals.
China rolls out another plan to adapt to climate change
China’s Ministry of Ecology and Environment, and various other departments, yesterday published a new plan to tackle climate change amid another season of heavy rainfall that has already left at least 32 people dead in southern China.
High-speed train accident kills one, injures eight in Guizhou Province
A Guangzhou-bound train derailed after plowing into landslide debris, but China’s high-speed railway network has proven to be remarkably safe despite the country’s mountainous geography and climate extremes.
NGLC Giving Circle awards nearly $20,000 to emerging organizations combating climate change
“Across the world, targeting specific groups—in our case, people who love the outdoors—and empowering locals to use their voices to get more support, that is absolutely what we need more of,” says Kyle Obermann, co-founder of China Outdoors Collective.
China doubles down on coal
Forget clean energy: The approval of a new mega-mine in Ordos, China’s mining hub, shows that Beijing is still committed to mining coal.
Outlier or New Normal? Trends from the 2022 China’s Global Energy Finance Database Update - The China Africa Project
There were “no new energy development finance commitments in 2021 from China to foreign governments through its two most active policy banks” for the first time in the 21st century, a policy brief has found using the China Global Energy Finance (CGEF) Database managed by the Boston University Global Development Policy Center. Some more interesting findings:
From 2016 to 2021, CDB and CHEXIM conducted 92 loans worth $75.1 billion to 37 foreign governments and entities in the energy sector, far exceeding total energy sector lending by the World Bank over the same period. China is not alone in decreasing development finance in 2021, as most development finance institutions around the world decreased new commitments last year.
China Seeks to Cut Coal Import Reliance With Mining Boom
China plans to increase domestic coal production capacity by about 300 million tons in an effort to reduce its reliance on imports, a plan that will deal a blow to its climate ambitions.
Deadly link between sharp emissions fall and China’s record 2020 rains
A sudden drop in air pollutants was linked to China’s record-breaking rainfall in 2020, according to a study by Nature Communications. The drop, caused by industry shutdown from the COVID-19 pandemic, was a major contributor to one-third of the extreme rains that led to mass flooding, killing more than 150 and affecting 55 million people.
Air quality and health co-benefits of China’s carbon dioxide emissions peaking before 2030
Early carbon peak could save lots of Chinese lives, and lots of money. If carbon emissions top off before 2030 under the 1.5°C target, it could help China avoid around 118,000 deaths by 2030 and around 614,000 by 2050 from exposure to the most deadly small particles, a Nanjing University study published in Nature Communications found.
Industry and power generation are the two major sources of carbon emissions in China, contributing more than 80% of the total emissions in 2010 due to the sectors’ intense use of fossil fuels, especially coal. A rapid shift away from fossil fuels toward zero- or low-carbon energy sources and more carbon capture systems (CCS) under a strict climate target would drive the substantial reduction in carbon emissions and help meet the current NDC target. Under a 2°C target, carbon mitigation costs could be more than offset by health co-benefits in 2050, yielding a net benefit of $393 billion to $3,017 billion (in 2017 USD value).
China’s $60 Billion Wind Empire Needs to Grow Its Own Blades
China dominates the world’s wind energy market, but it has to import balsa, the light tropical wood that all wind turbine manufacturers use in their blades. But now China’s $60 billion wind industry is set on planting its own balsa trees on a commercial scale.
Meeting Anti-Pollution Targets, Beijing Breathed Clean Air in 2021
Beijing met its pollution targets in 2021: “The Chinese capital recorded only eight heavily polluted days last year,” Sixth Tone reports, and “the average concentrations of six major air pollutants — including the hazardous PM2.5, PM10, ground-level ozone, and sulfur dioxide — were below the national standard for the first time since 2013.”
China Climate Plan Needs Power Lines for Green Energy
Ultra-high-voltage (UHV) power lines will be essential for China’s clean energy future, because unlike coal and other fossil fuels, “wind and sunshine can’t be trucked to power plants closer to urban centers,” Bloomberg reports. Bloomberg writes that the project of building out UHV lines in China “will take 30 years and cost $300 billion,” and it won’t be a frictionless process, because however clean the power the lines carry is, the thickening web of high voltage towers is “expensive, noisy and, to many, a blight on the landscape.”
China's JA Solar to Put USD1.6 Billion Into Third Big 2021 Expansion Plan
Renewable energy giant JA Solar Technology will spend $1.6 billion to build wind and solar power stations in the northeast, on the momentum of China’s renewed commitment to clean energy after COP26.
China’s Coal Support Continues With $31 Billion Finance Promise
China continues to set itself apart from global peers when it comes to coal, allocating more than 200 billion yuan ($31 billion) in financing at a time when most global banks are shunning the fuel.
China to set up $31.4 bln relending facility for cleaner coal use
China will establish a special relending facility worth 200 billion yuan ($31.35 billion) to support the clean use of coal, state broadcaster CCTV quoted the country's cabinet as saying on Wednesday.
EXCLUSIVE Merkel pushes German tech in urging China to make coal power cleaner
German Chancellor Angela Merkel has said she encouraged Chinese Premier Li Keqiang in a call to make sure the new coal-fired power plants that China is building were at least more efficient than older ones, mentioning German companies' expertise.
China's key industries could hit peak coal use by 2024 - govt researcher
China's major coal consuming industries, including power, steel, cement and coal chemical production, could hit peak use of the dirty fossil fuel around 2024, a government researcher said on Wednesday.
U.S., China issue joint pledge to slow climate change in the next decade
A last-minute U.S.-China climate pledge at COP26: With just two days left at the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, John Kerry and Xiè Zhènhuá 解振华, the special climate envoys of the world’s two largest emitters, unexpectedly announced the U.S.-China Joint Glasgow Declaration on Enhancing Climate Action in the 2020s. The 16-point declaration adds detail to an earlier U.S.-China joint statement from April, though the effects of the new statement are still unclear, and the two countries made no major commitments beyond what was already public. Kerry and Xie both said that the new declaration “was a product of nearly three dozen negotiating sessions,” according to the Washington Post, which adds, “One European negotiator said that the significance of the U.S.-China accord was no guarantee that the broader talks in Glasgow would succeed.”
China’s Coal Pledge Could Have Canada-Sized Emissions Impact
A Canada-sized reduction in CO2 emissions: Xí Jìnpíng 习近平 effectively marked the end of new international coal financing in September by pledging China “will not build new coal-fired power projects abroad,” but the exact amount of coal power capacity that would be averted was not immediately clear. One study now has a rough estimate: According to the Boston University Global Development Policy Center, “646 million tons of annual CO2 emissions could be avoided, more than Canada’s current annual fossil CO2 emissions.” Additionally, a joint report from the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA) and Global Energy Monitor (GEM) found that China’s pledge would effectively cancel “two thirds” of planned coal power projects in Asian countries outside of China and India.
When Will China Get Off Coal?
Reality check on climate goals: In a ChinaFile conversation, four experts — Lauri Myllyvirta, Alex Wang, Ilaria Mazzocco, and Philip Andrews-Speed — agree that China’s climate goals are feasible, though more details on policy implementation are needed. The experts pointed out that China has still not defined the level at which emissions are set to peak by 2030, and Andrews-Speed suggested that the 2060 carbon-neutral goal might not be possible unless China significantly ramps up carbon capture, usage, and storage (CCUS) technology.
China Binges on U.S. Gas to Manage Energy Shortage, Carbon Footprint
Record U.S. liquefied natural gas exports to China today are in contrast to just a couple of years ago, after the country imposed tariffs on U.S. LNG during the trade war.
'Ordinary people suffer most': China farms face climate woes
A “national awakening” on climate change? Li Shuo, a climate policy expert at Greenpeace East Asia in Beijing, suggested that a series of recent natural disasters made worse by climate change is having an effect on public attitudes in China. The Associated Press reports that “in a common pattern around the world, those who have contributed least to the warming and have the fewest resources to adapt often feel the pain most acutely.”
China to Issue Carbon Reduction Plans for Specific Sectors, Xi Says
President vows the country will press ahead with its decarbonization efforts with series of plans and measures in the ‘1 plus N’ policy framework
China Hurries to Burn More Coal, Putting Climate Goals at Risk
Faced with electricity shortages, the country is racing to expand mining despite risks to the environment, miner safety and the economy.
These Companies Pollute the World More Than Entire Nations
“China Baowu, the world’s top steelmaker, put more CO2 into the atmosphere last year than Pakistan”: Bloomberg worked with CREA, a Finland-based environmental research group, to better understand “some of the largest emitters in China’s most-polluting sectors.” The resulting article also analyzes the path to carbon neutrality for six major sectors: power supply, steel, construction, petrochemical, transportation, and agriculture.
