China’s eco warrior Xi Jinping is addicted to coal
Xi Jinping is the closest you get to an environmental crusader in the top echelons of China’s political system. He was green before it became fashionable.
As Zhejiang party chief 20 years ago he wrote a weekly newspaper column noted for denouncing ecological degradation and for warning that China’s “energy-intensive and high-polluting” economic model was unsustainable. This was unique among regional bosses at the time and required some courage, pitting him against the prevailing orthodoxy of break-neck industrialisation and GDP worship.
China is determined not to be pushed around by the West as it charts its path to a post-fossil fuel economy. Credit:AP
Xi backed the radical “Green GDP” campaign in 2004 which called on local governments to report data more honestly, subtracting ecological damage and the “debt to the future” from raw GDP figures. There was a crackdown on the worst-offending power and industrial companies.
Vested interests defeated the campaign, though Xi continued to release adjusted Green figures for Zhejiang after others had returned to the normal game of GDP inflation, making his tenure look less successful by the crude metric of the day.
A key figure in that forgotten Green GDP saga, Xie Zhenhua, is now China’s top climate envoy at COP26. It was he who pushed the concept of a modified Kuznets Curve – an inverted “U” – where CO2 emissions peak and then decline as a country reaches a threshold of economic development.
It was this Kuznets Curve that gave Xi the arguments he needed to justify climate actions against entrenched opposition from the old guard. It paved the way for his famous Yingtai evening chat with Barack Obama, which in turn led to the Paris climate accord in 2015.
It was a complete departure from China’s obstructionist role (pre-Xi) at Copenhagen in 2009, when Beijing mischievously turned it into a fight between poor countries and the West.
One should not read too much into Xi’s apparent decision to skip the COP26 summit. He is in the middle of a turbulent internal shake-up, a purge on multiple fronts. Foes are plotting to thwart his bid for a third term and meetings of the Standing Committee in early November will be critical.
When it comes to wolf warrior diplomacy, China is its own worst enemy. Beijing has been ruffling feathers by linking COP26 action to concessions from the West on other matters. But it is of course China that is at the sharp end of a “two degree” world.
China has 20 per cent of the world’s population but 6 per cent of its fresh water, and this supply is in danger. Renewable water supply – a quarter of the global average per capita (World Bank) – cannot cover intensive irrigation so the aquifers of the North China plain are being systematically depleted.
One should not read too much into Xi’s apparent decision to skip the COP26 summit. He is in the middle of a turbulent internal shake-up, a purge on multiple fronts. Foes are plotting to thwart his bid for a third term and meetings of the Standing Committee in early November will be critical.
The Himalayas and Tibet – Asia’s “water tower” – are heating twice as fast as the global mean. A report by the China Meteorological Administration in August said glacier loss has already reached 15 per cent. This is likely to accelerate and destabilise the great river systems that have fed China through history. Instead of the slow drip-drip of seasonal ice melt, water will cascade down in spring floods that wash away topsoil, followed by long droughts. China had a foretaste this year.
A $US60 billion ($79.8 billion) project is under way to channel water from South China to the arid plains of the North, but it is a race against time in the face of creeping desertification. The Gobi is losing 3,000 square kilometres a year of grassland. A study by Chinese scientists in Nature said attempts to halt erosion with a frantic tree planting campaign have gone tragically wrong, raising the likelihood of an irreversible ecological disaster.
So why is Xi’s China further blighting its own future with plans for more coal plants? Global Energy Monitor says China commissioned 38 GW of new coal in 2020, three times as much as the rest of the world put together. It initiated 74 GW of further capacity last year and now accounts 85 per cent of all plants under development on the planet.
The figures are grotesque. China’s share of global emissions is already 28 per cent. Coal burning on this scale guarantees runaway climate change and would turn China into a pariah.
It is a conundrum. One (weak) answer is that capacity is not use. China fears a US energy blockade along the lines of Franklin D Roosevelt’s embargo against Japan in 1941. Domestic coal is a strategic back-up.
A better answer is that the emperor is far away and the mountains are high, to borrow an old Chinese saying. Xi’s consolidation of power has been a step-by-step process, navigating party intrigue and picking fights selectively with regional fiefdoms. Local party bosses in cahoots with the coal lobby were emboldened by Trump’s climate denialism to resume business as usual.
Xi is arguably more powerful today and is tightening the leash. China’s eco-inspectors read the riot act to the National Energy Administration in January, ordering the body to undergo “rectification” for breaching climate targets by giving out excessive licences for coal power and heavy industry. The report told officials to “resolutely implement the Jinping Ecological Civilisation Thought, and firmly establish the concept of green development”.
In a sense it was the opening gambit of the Great Disruption now under way in China as Xi attempts to break the national addiction to metal bashing, construction and the fossil fuel industry.
Many in the West have concluded that Xi is blowing smoke, talking the net-zero game with no intention of delivering. But this ignores China’s parallel bid for supremacy in green technology, spelled out openly in the Made in China 2025 plan. Beijing clearly thinks it can win that contest.
Energy conundrum: Along with its green push, China is planning to build more coal plants.Credit:AP
Its headlong rush into solar, wind, lithium batteries and electric vehicles is, if anything, accelerating. It installed 74 GW of wind power last year, more than the rest of the world, and three times as much as in 2019. It will reach 40 per cent of global solar capacity by the end of this year. The 14th Five Year Plan (2020-2025) makes Europe’s Green Deal look modest.
It also ignores the power struggles within the party. A more sanguine interpretation – for climate policy at least – is that the rearguard defenders of brown GDP have finally been checked.
The word from Beijing is that China will find its own way to a post-fossil economy and will not be pushed around by the West. Nor he will compete in a half-sincere Dutch auction of grandstanding promises.
Even so, Xi may yet surprise us all with a COP26 stunner: peak emissions by 2026 instead of 2030. That would bring us down to a two-degree trajectory. One can but hope.
Telegraph, London
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