China’s rise to the carbon top

China is rapidly becoming the world’s top emitter of climate change gases, writes Toby Vogel.

The threat of catastrophic climate change has opened up deep divisions between Europe and the US. But if the politics of curbing carbons emissions are tricky in the world’s rich societies, they are trickier still in up-and-coming China and India, the world’s largest developing economies.

In its annual World Energy Outlook, published just weeks before the Bali summit, the International Energy Agency (IEA) - an advisory body to industrialised nations - said that China accounted for 58% of the increase in carbon emissions between 2000 and 2006.

The report also pointed out that China was set to overtake the US this year as the top emitter of carbon dioxide and that it was on track to replace the US as the world’s top energy consumer shortly after 2010.

China’s rise in the league tables for carbon emissions and energy consumption is mainly fuelled by staggering economic growth. According to World Bank data, China’s growth in annual gross domestic product per person has never been less than 6.6% in the last 15 years but has reached as high as 12.8%. The world’s developed countries as a group, by contrast, have had growth rates ranging from -3.1% to 4.5% during the same period.

So China’s lowest annual growth rate over the past 15 years was more than two percentage points above the developed countries’ highest rate.

Rapidly growing econo-mies need lots of energy. In China, coal-fired power plants, out of fashion in much of the developed world, help meet the demand - but they also pollute far more than other methods of energy production.

Despite rapid growth and old technology, China’s emissions per person are far below those of industrialised economies. Even if the IEA’s predictions come true and China’s total contribution to global emissions rises to more than a quarter by 2030 (it currently contributes around one fifth), China would still emit less than half of the emissions per person produced by the US.

Even with lower emissions per person, though, the sheer size of the country - China currently has a population of some 1.3 billion against the US’ 304 million - puts it among the top emitters.

China was clearly unhappy with the IEA’s report.

Wang Siqiang, a deputy director of Bejing’s energy office, said that some of the report’s assumptions were "quite subjective" and expressed his hope that future reports would be "closer to reality". He also said that such research should be "based on facts".

But beyond specific quibbles - and Wang was quite circumspect about which figures his government disputes - this is, at heart, a philosophical disagreement, not unlike those that can be observed on labour practices, for example.

China argues that it is unfair that it should be held to standards which are more appropriate for industrialised nations. Applying these standards to budding economies like China and India, it says, would stifle growth, which in turn is the most effective anti-poverty and development strategy.

"The results of looking at developing countries like China and India through western eyes, through developed country eyes, are different from the results of looking at China or India through the eyes of a developing country," Wang said.

Some environmental groups agree that China and India are being made scapegoats and that the US - hitherto the largest polluter in absolute terms and still by far the largest per capita - is the far bigger problem politically and environmentally, not least because it has refused to ratify the Kyoto Protocol. (The mood in the US seems to be shifting, however.) And a new study by WWF, a conservation group, suggests that if all of the world’s population lived the way Europeans do, we would need 2.6 times the planet Earth to meet their demands.

So it might be a good thing that China and India have not yet caught up with European and North American standards of living.

The Indian tiger’s insatiable energy demands

Like China, India is a huge country - it currently has a population of some 1.1 billion - that is developing fast and hence has a near-insatiable appetite for energy.

The potential for burgeoning energy demand is massive in a country where 400-600 million people currently have no access to electricity. As the country gets more prosperous, its people will gradually be linked up to the grid while existing customers will consume more power and hence produce more emissions. A more affluent society will drive more cars, own more fridges and air conditioning units, and buy more goods and services whose production consumes energy.

According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), India will overtake Russia by 2015 as number three emitter of carbon dioxide, after China and the US.

But if economic growth drives increasing energy consumption, it is also the most effective way to lower poverty rates. According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the absolute number of Indians living in poverty has fallen over the past few years for the first time since independence in 1947. In relative terms, the gains are even more impressive. The OECD believes that India has a good shot at meeting one of the UN’s Millennium Development Goals, to cut poverty in half by 2015, provided it can meet growth forecasts of some 10% annually.

It is tempting to see a straightforward trade-off between poverty reduction and economic development on the one hand, and emissions reduction on the other.

At last week’s (14 November) World Energy Congress in Rome, the managing director of India’s largest utility company said that economic growth and access to energy were priorities for India. "People below the poverty line should not be denied the benefits of economic growth," he added.

But this need not be a zero-sum game. The IEA acknowledges that China and India have every right to improve the lot of their citizens, and that soaring demand for energy is a global problem. "China’s and India’s energy challenges are the world’s energy challenges, which call for collective responses," it said in its report. As long as 90% of new power plants in India and China burn coal, however, calls for global action will have little impact on actual emissions.

China is rapidly becoming the world’s top emitter of climate change gases, writes Toby Vogel.