The New York Times reports today something a lot of people have suspected for a long time: “China, the world’s leading emitter of greenhouse gases from coal, has been burning up to 17 percent more coal a year than the government previously disclosed, according to newly released data.”
How big is this? Well, in recent years it amounts to a jump of between 900 million and 1 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions a year, an amount, the Times helpfully points out, that is about equal to the entire greenhouse gas emissions from Germany. A rounding error, this is not.
This is not the first time China has understated its coal consumption. As the Times notes, “In the late 1990s, small coal mines were ordered to close, but many of them simply stopped reporting their output to the government. For a time, this created an erroneous impression that China had succeeded in generating economic growth without increasing emissions.”
What this episode should do (but won’t) is give folks pause about the confidence they can place in China’s ability to deliver on its promises, especially its long-promised national emissions trading system. Leaving aside the uncomfortable fact that China’s cap & trade scheme isn’t even designed to reduce emissions, it’s fair to ask how effective such a system will be given the country clearly doesn’t seem to have a handle on how much carbon dioxide it’s actually emitting.
Not that it really matters, because at the end of the day, this affair will have a negligible impact on the United Nations climate deal expected to be reached in Paris later this year. Countries simply have too much invested in a politically-successful outcome to let something like a 17% error in Chinese emissions estimates interfere.
My guess is that instead of the international talks being guided by the principle of “trust but verify,” it’ll be “trust but . . . oh, never mind.”