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.

Comments

Re: This is why the US...

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly. The republicans have caused this problem in China.

The chinese are in a great economic recession

[NotInHere]

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.

Doubling the number of nuclear reactors works.

[Anonymous Coward]

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:Doubling the number of nuclear reactors works.

[Anonymous Coward]

They ARE selling reactors to the rest of the world. The ACPR1000 is a pretty reasonable gen 3 reactor. They are selling them all over the place. (except to the US)

They are ALSO doing massive solar installations where it makes sense to - but yeah, most of the time nuclear is making sense, so they are ramping it up in a big way. They have massive research going into Molten Salt Reactors. Its one of the reasons I think they are "not ready yet" is that China is not shy in putting something like them in place, but haven't done so yet.

You can be sure when they are ready, they will be putting them in bulk,
and considering the problems they are having with the coal plants, this shouldn't surprise anyone.

--- Blair

Re:Doubling the number of nuclear reactors works.

[nojayuk]

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.

Go Greenpeace

[mdsolar]

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

Re:Go Greenpeace

[penguinoid]

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?

Re:GDP Grew 6.9% in 2015

[NotInHere]

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/...

Re:GDP Grew 6.9% in 2015

[WindBourne]

mod parent up, please. Official numbers from china are worthless. Their coal numbers, their emissions, their GDP, etc are all predicated on lies.

WRONG

[WindBourne]

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.

Re:Pig iron

[WindBourne]

The traditional shape of the molds used for pig iron ingots was a branching structure formed in sand, with many individual ingots at right angles[2] to a central channel or runner, resembling a litter of piglets being suckled by a sow.

Re:Recessions will do that

[Gadget_Guy]

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.

Re:GDP Grew 6.9% in 2015

[WindBourne]

At this time, all of the major CO2 numbers are NOT done by sat. For western data, they are done by ground monitoring combined with data from govs. OTOH, 3rd world nation numbers, and sadly, China lumps themselves as 3rd world on this, are done by estimates based on data that gov. give up. China specifically forbids ANY physical monitoring.

Now, there are 2 sats above the globe measuring CO2. One is from Japan but has very poor resolution. The second is OCO-2. That is the one that showed that China was so far off, that China was forced to recently increase their coal numbers by 17% for the last decade. And it STILL does not match up with what OCO-2 sat is showing.

The problem is that ppl are IGNORING this because they want to give a pass to China and claim that America is the one that has done all of the pollution. Yet, CO2 is CUMULATIVE. And America did not really start up until 1850. Prior to that, it was Europe AND CHINA that did all of the pollution. ANd both areas did such heavy coal mining that there is ZERO chance that AMerica could touch them. In fact, from 1850 until 1980, Europe was ahead of America in CO2 emissions. It was only after 1980 that they started to cut back and America moved off nukes towards heavy coal. So, America has really less than 25 years of heavy CO2 growth (1980 - 2007). OTOH, CHina has 35 years of heavy CO2 growth and esp for the last 15 years. They have opened 1 new GW coal plant EVERY 3-5 days. Now, they are opening them at the rate of 1 new GW every 7-10 days, and will do so for the next 15 years.

This means that even with decent sat monitoring that we will lose since CHina's emissions growth is faster than what the west can shut down at. Even if America cut to zero TODAY, China will exceed it in 5-7 years.

Re:Congress sat on its hands

[sumdumass]

Ok, I'm coming right out and calling you a liar on this. If it happened i could easily find reference to it and you could easily cite one. That just isn't happening so I have to ask why you insist on perpetuating this lie? Is Obama doing something so important to you that you have to lie and make shit up? Why? Can't you see that it makes your support delusional?