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China Likely Cut GHG Emissions In 2015 (greenpeace.org)
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.
needs to cut emissions even more. It's sad to see the Republicans preventing this from happening.
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
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]".
Any time that someone links to a Google search as evidence of anything you know that what they are saying is most likely going to be wrong. I don't know what results were coming up in other regions for that search, but for me I get a first result that says that says that only the industrial goods-producing sector of the Chinese economy is in recession, and that "the domestic-oriented service sector is likely to keep growing at low, double-digit rates -- and that should result in real GDP growth of 4 percent to 5 percent". A growth of GDP means that they are not currently in recession.
The next result speculates on a future recession in China, and that "Fears of a sharp slowdown in China's economy ... has rattled global markets in recent months". It later says "while a global recession is not yet reflected in Citi's benchmark forecasts for global or Chinese growth in 2016, it is a view that has gained ground within Citi's global economics team". Once again, speculation and fears of what will happen in the future is not evidence that they are in recession now, and it is not even an immediate prediction that there will be one.
For a more up-to-date quote from the same person at Citigroup, the "in the news" part of the search results had this new article that said "Citi held its growth outlook for China in 2016, but cut it by 0.2 percentage points to 6.0 percent in 2017". That is a forecast of two years of positive growth, a far cry from the technical indicator of a recession of two consecutive quarters of negative economic growth.
China's rate of growth is definitely declining, that is not the same as saying that their growth is actually negative. They may be heading for it at some stage, but not yet. If their economy is moving from a goods producing industry to service providing one then that will have a positive impact on their greenhouse gas emissions. That does not mean that this reduction of emissions is unsustainable, nor that there is any need to "call you later".
I think that you are still looking for excuses to ignore this report so that you can still rely on the old "China pollutes so we shouldn't have to cut our GHG emissions" line.