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Greenpeace is known for taking on ambitious projects (to make an understatement). Accordingly, Greenpeace recently publicized its findings on China’s carbon footprint in a report entitled, “Polluting Power: Ranking China’s Power Companies.” The activist network is now calling for action, Reuters reports.
Greenpeace found alarming statistics in China’s coal usage: the country obtains more than two-thirds of its energy from coal, a cheap and abundant fuel source in China. Last year alone, China’s 10 biggest power generators together burned through 600 million tons of coal (about 20 percent of the country’s output), creating the equivalent of 1.44 billion tons of CO2. The three largest power firms created more than half of those emissions: 769 million tons – more than the emissions of all power firms in the UK combined (which produced a mere 623.8 million tons of CO2 in 2008).
(The Greenpeace report did laud China’s small but noteworthy emissions-trimming progress: the country shut down its smallest, least efficient power stations, and more closures are scheduled for 2012.)
Greenpeace has called for China to curb emissions by putting an environmental tax on coal prices and by establishing stricter renewable energy and efficiency standards.
The Reuters report highlights likely barriers to getting China to curb its emissions – primarily the country’s need for rapid economic growth and energy security. Also, China is behind Western nations in per-capita greenhouse gas emissions. The country wants wealthier nations to supply financial and technical support for China’s greener growth efforts.
Other nations, including those in the G8, are seeking to set international emissions goals, and to obtain China’s compliance with these goals, before the UN’s December 2009 convention in Copenhagen (at which the UN will establish a new emissions treaty). These efforts so far have been strained and inconclusive.
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