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China Likely Cut GHG Emissions In 2015 (greenpeace.org) 143

Posted by timothy from the nuclear-war-would-sure-cut-emissions dept.
mdsolar writes: Economic and industrial data released [Thursday] by the Chinese government's statistical agency indicates the country's carbon emissions likely fell by around 3% — with the contraction of key heavy industry sectors and the continued expansion of renewable energies driving a wedge between total energy demand and coal use. According to the data, China's coal output fell by 3.5% in 2015, thermal power generation by 3%, coal imports by 30%, pig iron output by 4%, coking coal output by 7%, and cement by 5%. All this suggests that both power sector coal consumption and total coal consumption probably fell by more than 4%. Total oil consumption grew only 1.1% in the first eleven months, gas consumption by 3.7% while cement production (which releases CO2 directly) fell by 4.9%. This indicates a fall of 3-4% in China's fossil CO2 emissions, roughly equal to Poland's total emissions.
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China Likely Cut GHG Emissions In 2015 More

China Likely Cut GHG Emissions In 2015

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  • The chinese are in a great economic recession (Score:5, Interesting)

    by NotInHere ( 3654617 ) on Saturday January 23, 2016 @07:34PM (#51358945)

    They aren't the workbench of the world anymore -- there are cheaper countries for these tasks. Yes, its still full of industry, but the trend is towards salary raises and therefore higher cost which means less competitiveness on the international market.

    Also, china has created an artificial bubble in the aftermath of the 2007 crash, which is now, slowly, collapsing. There had been a big real estate bubble as well, which collapsed too.

    The shrinking economy then leads to less emissions. Its good that they can indeed cut their emissions, but it would be greater if they could continue to do it with their economy growing.

    • Yeah, China is in recession if words don't mean what they mean. http://www.wsj.com/articles/as... [wsj.com]

      • Its enough if the steel industry has problems, melting steel needs a lot of energy. And it really has massive problems: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/... [bloomberg.com]

    • and yet, all CHina needs to do, which they are doing, is manipulate their money relative to the west to keep their COG cheaper than ours.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by arglebargle_xiv ( 2212710 )

      The shrinking economy then leads to less emissions. Its good that they can indeed cut their emissions, but it would be greater if they could continue to do it with their economy growing.

      The phrase "cut their emissions" implies they took some sort of positive action to deal with their environmental problems, when in fact all that happened is that they manufactured less and so spewed less pollution. As soon as things recover, so will the emissions. So a more accurate characterisation would be "The Chinese recession caused emissions to drop. As soon as things recover, [Austrian]they'll be back[/Austrian]".

      • The phrase "cut their emissions" implies they took some sort of positive action to deal with their environmental problems, when in fact all that happened is that they manufactured less and so spewed less pollution.

        You didn't even read the article or even the summary before blathering out that nonsense. From TFA [greenpeace.org]:

        "Booming renewable energy generation - China was able to reduce fossil fuel fired power generation by 3% while overall power demand increased 0.5% by adding 30GW of wind power and 17GW of solar capacity, a new world record for any country ever."

        In what universe does adding "a new world record for any country" amount of renewable energy sources equates to them not taking any positive action to deal with their

    • ...it would be greater if they could continue to do it with their economy growing.

      From what I hear and read, China are very active in the development of environmentally friendly technologies, and according to some are amongst the world leaders in this area. This makes sense, of course - when your economy has been growing rapidly, and pollution levels are unsustainable, your mind focuses naturally on solving that problem. It could be that their slowdown allows them to catch up technologically and improve their industry, so that they are able to continue to cut emissions when their econom

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by MrL0G1C ( 867445 )

      WTF? Their economy is still growing by about 6-8% it's just not growing as fast as before, no surprise for a maturing economy.

    • Recession? Are you kidding? They're growing at a rate of 6.5% per year! That is red-hot in any other country! Jeez. Where do you get your news, the BBC?

      And not the workbench of the world! WTF! Have you even been to a trade show recently? There are whole sectors of products where the only real suppliers are Chinese. Wake up, jeez how do people get so ignorant?

  • Doubling the number of nuclear reactors works. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 23, 2016 @07:36PM (#51358963)

    They have currently 21 reactors being built, I believe they are mostly gen 3s. After this year only Gen 3's (or higher) will be considered for building in China.
    They have a long term plan which involves building a LOT more reactors. Essentially building them as fast as they can with relative safely.

    No doubt, If a good fusion design come out in the next 10 years, they will build a bunch of those as well.

    --- Blair

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by MrL0G1C ( 867445 )

      And while they spend the next decade building those, last year they installed 17 to 22GW of solar power, and they will likely be building another 100GW+ in the next 5 years dwarfing nuclear builds. 5 Years from now when solar has halved in cost again, nuclear will look like a pointless mistake.

      • Re:Doubling the number of nuclear reactors works. (Score:4, Interesting)

        by nojayuk ( 567177 ) on Sunday January 24, 2016 @09:24AM (#51360929)

        Question -- when you say the Chinese have installed "installed 17 to 22GW of solar power" in 2015 does that mean the installations will produce an average of 17 to 22GW of power or do you mean the solar plants have that maximum capacity but will only deliver a fraction of that amount of electricity over the period of a year, day and night?

        The nuclear reactors China is building and planning to build will operate with an uptime of about 90% or so, so the six (by my count) 1GW reactors they brought into operation in 2015 will produce an average of 5.5GW day and night, rain and shine. The twenty or so reactors under construction will add another 15GW or so of similarly reliable power over the next few years.

        The bad news is that the Chinese are going to keep building new coal power plants, more efficient and less polluting than the older plants being decommissioned or retrofitted because they need hundreds of gigawatts of new electricity capacity to meet demand and coal is cheap and readily available (China mines about half the world's total output of coal annually) and no-one cares enough about the ongoing pollution disaster and its health effects for them to stop burning coal.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by MrL0G1C ( 867445 )

          "The bad news is that the Chinese are going to keep building new coal power plants,"

          The actual news suggests otherwise, they are closing coal plants and installing wind, solar, nuclear, hydro etc. see summary - coal burning is down, not up.

          As they are building more solar panel factories hand over fist and with the prices of panels becoming ever cheaper, I expect the installation of solar panels to continue growing exponentially. Nuclear OTOH is poor value for money and accident prone.

  • Go Greenpeace (Score:5, Funny)

    by mdsolar ( 1045926 ) on Saturday January 23, 2016 @07:52PM (#51359013) Homepage Journal
    The source for this is Greenpeace, one of the more fair and balanced sources of information.

    • The source for this is Greenpeace, one of the more fair and balanced sources of information.

      That sentence is a perfect illustration of Poe's law.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by cfalcon ( 779563 )

        No, it's not.

        Greenpeace has assuredly done some sketchy shit to get shocking scenes. They are also undeniably highly biased. Therefore it's sarcasm because Greenpeace is very one sided. Plus, it's using the Fox news "Fair and Balanced", which means that the poster is mocking Fox as well as Greenpeace.

        Not an example of Poe's law.

    • BTW mdsolar, how are you getting along with your new friend mdnuclear? Or will you tell him to stick it where the sun don't shine?

    • The source for this is the Chinese gov. They are releasing data that they see fit to release, and manipulate it like there is no tomorrow. Greenpeace was simply an organization that forwarded the Chinese data. Yet, this is the same Chinese gov that just had to come forward recently and claim that they burned 17% more coal than they had originally omitted to for the last 10 years.
      • They are reporting in a fair and balanced manner. If it were me, I might bring up organ harvesting or some other issues there. But I 'm biased.
        • what is fair and balanced have to do with honest numbers from the Chinese gov? They have already proven that they are liars WRT climate change and raw data that effects it.
          And why are you biased?
          • I was in Taipei during Tiananmen. Very sad. Ran into some Falun Gong protesters recently as well in DC.

      • Economic data is generally considered suspect - the lower level the government, the more suspect. Generally no province will report lower growth numbers than the national average. No city lower than the province. No county lower than the city. However many economists will look at power production data, rail transport data, and sea port data. Those numbers are considered sufficiently reliable, and indeed do seem to give a very accurate picture of the overall economy. They do at least correlate quite well wit

        • wrong. It has already been shown that even those numbers on power, rail and sea are now being manipulated by both provinces AND federal gov.

  • have you looked at the stock market recently?
    Any idea of what is driving that?
    If so this would not be a surprise, and this would not be proclaimed to be an achievement.

    • have you looked at the stock market recently? Any idea of what is driving that?

      Mostly fear. A severe recession in China should affect the US GDP by less than .2% (and China doesn't seem to be in recession, merely their growth has slowed). Investors are keeping their holdings in cash. Watch for a stock market rebound in a month or so when companies start releasing profit reports (assuming the reports are good, of course).

      Oil prices being low are good for the economy.....when you can buy things at a cheaper price, that's good. With the exception of North Dakota and a bit of Texas, the

      • actually, others with better numbers, say that CHina IS doing around 3-5% GDP AT BEST. Jim Chanos for 1. Barrons is another.
        More importantly, they expect it to be in a full recession by end of 2016.

        • actually, others with better numbers, say that CHina IS doing around 3-5% GDP AT BEST.

          Which is actually growth, not a recession.

          More importantly, they expect it to be in a full recession by end of 2016.

          That's possible, but again, even if they go into a severe recession, we're looking at it affecting the US GDP around .1-.2%. One of the advantage of not exporting much is that the US doesn't depend on foreign economies to buy their stuff.

  • If this was true, then why are the number of coal plants still going up and the amount of coal that they burn, still going up?
    In addition, look at the data from OCO2. That shows that CO2 is INCREASING, NOT decreasing.
    • Souldn't CO2 increase until emissions stop?
      • OCO2 is measuring the levels above the cities and then past them. That is why when you look at OCO2 data, you see high emissions of CO2 directly over the entire eastern seaboard. Then you see high emissions past Japan and northerly (that is in the fall).

        The OCO-2 data in Oct and Nov, clearly show an INCREASE in CO2 emissions from the CHinese eastern seaboard. That would make sense since they are still building out new 1GW coal plants at a rate of 1 every 7-10 days. It also means that loads of coal is s
        • October and November is when leaves fall and start to decompose in the Northern Hemisphere which should be the strongest signal still.
          • That is irrelevant. What is relevant is that China's CO2 emissions, as shown by OCO-2, from Oct/Nov of 2014 is less than Oct/Nov of 2015. IOW, CO2 emissions grew. So GHG are NOT going down. In fact, with their working on converting coal into methane, I doubt that the CHinese will bury the CO2. That is not their nature. Instead, they will simply dump it to the atmosphere.
            • OCO-2 may help with that kind of thing, but first you need to understand rainfall and growing season temperature to figure out the much larger seasonal signal.
              • why? the amount of CO2 that mankind puts off is SOOO much bigger than that. IOW, that will make no difference, esp. when comparing on a year to year basis.
                • The natural seasonal swing is large. Look at the Keeling curve. Much larger that annual anthropogenic additions.

    • Interestingly, here it's Greenpeace's bias that gives it more credibility to me.

      Greenpeace isn't stupid, on the contrary. They're pretty smart in progressing their cause and when it comes to publicity. They have to, the organisation lives and dies with publicity and the resulting donations. They're not a mouthpiece of the Chinese government, and in general I don't think they're very supportive of the Chinese government considering its less than stellar environmental record. Yet they choose to publish this d

      • oco-2 is a nasa satellite that measures CO2 below it. It is ACCURATE in contrast to getting data from gov or estimates from a group.
        What is nice about this, is that it is REAL data, and not prone to manipulation. OTOH, ALL of the govs are playing games WRT CO2. Everybody wants to hold every other nation responsible, not themselves. That is why I continue to say that we need to tax all goods based on where the worst sub-part comes from.
  • What is "pig iron" ethymology? Wikipedia has no record about that.

  • New unit of measurement.

  • Traditional fuel suppliers have devised a perfect weapon against solar power in China. They simply generate so much soot that sunlight can never reach a solar cell or collector.
  • From what I'd heard (from people who were there last year), China was installing new coal fired power plants at the rate of about 1 per day through 2015. While I agree that's anecdotal, it's not like the Chinese government numbers are reliable. This article boils down to: "I can draw unreliable conclusions from unreliable data."

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