Shift Key Classic: Have China’s Carbon Emissions Peaked?

Robinson Meyer and Jesse Jenkins are off this week. Please enjoy this selection from the Shift Key archive.

China’s greenhouse gas emissions were essentially flat in 2024 — or they recorded a tiny increase, according to a November report from the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air, or CREA. A third of experts surveyed by the report believe that its coal emissions have peaked. Has the world’s No. 1 emitter of carbon pollution now turned a corner on climate change?

Lauri Myllyvirta is the co-founder and lead analyst at CREA, an independent research organization focused on air pollution and headquartered in Finland. Myllyvirta has worked on climate policy, pollution, and energy issues in Asia for the past decade, and he lived in Beijing from 2015 to 2019.

On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob and Jesse talk with Lauri about whether China’s emissions have peaked, why the country is still building so much coal power (along with gobs of solar and wind), and the energy-intensive shift that its economy has taken in the past five years. Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap, and Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University.

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Here is an excerpt from our conversation:

Robinson Meyer: When we think about Chinese demand emissions going forward, it sounds like — somewhat to my surprise, perhaps — this is increasingly a power sector story, which is … is that wrong? Is it an industrial story? Is it a …

Lauri Myllyvirta: I want to emphasize the steel sector besides power. So if you simply look at what the China Steel Association is projecting, which is a gradual, gentle decline in total output and the increase in the availability of scrap. If you use that to replace coal-based with electricity-based steelmaking, you can achieve an about 40% reduction in steelmaking emissions over the next decade.

Of course, some of that is going to shift to electricity, so you need the clean electricity as well to realize it. But that’s at least as large an opportunity as there is on the power sector, so that’s what I’m telling everyone — that if you want to understand what China can accomplish over the next decade, it’s these two sectors, first and foremost.

Jesse Jenkins: Yeah. I mean, there’s some positive overall trends, right? If you look at the arc that we’re seeing in each sector, with renewables growth starting to outpace demand growth in electricity and eat into coal in absolute terms, not just market share, with the transition in the steel industry — which is sort of a story that we’ve seen in multiple countries as they move through different phases, right? As you’re building out your primary infrastructure, the first time you don’t have enough scrap, but as the infrastructure and rate of car recycling and things like that goes up, you now have a much larger supply. And that’s the case in the U.S., where the vast majority of our steel now comes from scrap.

And then, you know, the slowdown in the construction boom — China’s built an enormous amount of infrastructure and housing, and there’s only so much more that they need. And so the pace of that construction is likely to fall, as well. And then finally, the big shift to EVs in the transportation sector. So you’ve got your four largest-emitting sources on a very positive trajectory when it comes to greenhouse gas emissions.

Mentioned:

CREA’s reports on China’s emissions trajectory

Chinese EV companies beat their own targets in 2024

How China Created an EV Juggernaut

Jeremy Wallace: China Can’t Decide if It Wants to Be the World’s First ‘Electrostate’

This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by …

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Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.