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For nearly a year, climate specialists have been speculating that carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from China—the world’s largest emitter—may have peaked in 2023, well before a government goal to halt emissions growth by 2030. Supporting evidence emerged earlier this month, when a new analysis from the Asia Society Policy Institute showed that China’s increasing reliance on renewable energy had cut CO2 output during the April to June quarter by 1% compared with the same period of 2023.
However, two contradictory trends raise questions about exactly when and at what level China’s emissions might peak—a key issue for global efforts to curb climate change.
On one hand, China now far outpaces the rest of the world in installing new solar and wind capacity, cutting emissions growth. But the country also leads the world in firing up new coal-fueled power plants, a major source of planet-warming CO2.
The competing efforts have created “a lot of uncertainty” in projecting the future of China’s emissions, which now account for 31% of the world’s total, says Glen Peters, an analyst at the Center for International Climate Research in Norway. Further clouding the crystal ball: a mix of economic and political factors, including pressure from Chinese energy companies to keep coal plants producing revenue as long as possible.
Despite those uncertainties, Peters and others still expect China to handily beat the 2030 peaking deadline, which President Xi Jinping set in 2020. That target is in reach because of China’s rapid deployment of renewables. Last year, China commissioned as much new solar power as the entire world brought online in 2022, and its capacity to generate wind energy expanded by two-thirds, according to the International Energy Agency. China currently has 339 gigawatts (GW) of utility-scale solar and wind power under construction, more than the rest of the world combined, according to a July report from the Global Energy Monitor (GEM). And GEM’s total does not include rooftop panels and other small-scale solar installations that made up about 40% of last year’s new solar capacity. (China has also been adding other sources of energy that have low carbon emissions. Over the past 2.5 years, for example, authorities have approved plans to build 31 nuclear reactors.)
The Asia Society’s recent review of China’s overall CO2 output so far this year also noted a 3% drop in March compared with March 2023. Such data suggest the nation is “on track for a decline in annual emissions” this year, Lauri Myllyvirta, an emissions analyst, wrote in an 8 August post on the Carbon Brief website.
