China Burns a Lot More Coal Than It’s Claimed in the Past

The adjusted data show that consumption has been underestimated since 2000, particularly in recent years.

Song adds that he has direct confirmation from the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change secretariat, the body responsible for the Paris talks, that its most recent “synthesis report”-a document that outlines how much greenhouse gas pollution countries are willing to cut in the lead-up to Paris, released at the end of October-incorporates the most recent Chinese data”.

But a revision in China’s coal consumption statistics won’t threaten the success of climate talks in Paris.

China’s National Bureau of Statistics did not immediately confirm the report.

“It is the reduction in the costs of renewable energy that will be able to meet your incremental power demand”, Liebreich said to his audience in China, especially because “we know the economy won’t be growing at 10 percent but nearer to six or seven percent”.

Remember a while back when Obama came back from China with a bilateral climate agreement in which China would cap its greenhouse gas emissions by…

But the World Resource Institute (WRI), and environmental monitoring, research and advocacy group, says United Nations officials are fully aware of the northward revisions of statistics by the Chinese government, and that the new numbers are included in the official United Nations documents used by negotiators. China, you are the Michael Jordan of spewing sulfur dioxide. The revised emissions estimates are due entirely to the nation’s coal consumption.

“Obviously it is not good news that China’s coal consumption was much higher than previously thought, but it is heartening that China corrected the data and reported it transparently”, wrote Kelly Sims Gallagher, who directs the Center for worldwide Environment and Resource Policy at Tufts University’s Fletcher School, in an email.

When a country consumes as much coal as China does – more than 4 billion tons in 2013, far more than any other country in the world – painting an accurate picture can be challenging. In the late 1990s, small coal mines were ordered to close, but many of them simply stopped reporting their output to the government. For a time, this created an erroneous impression that China had succeeded in generating economic growth without increasing emissions. With China recently promising to stop the increase in its carbon dioxide emissions by 2030, the new figure makes the responsibility of fulfilling that promise more hard – and more urgent.

The analysis, also backed by Bloomberg Philanthropies, found that the electric sector is on track to total just 1,983 million metric tons this year, marking the first time the sector’s carbon emissions have fallen below 2 billion metric tonsin two decades. The task for scientists, then, is to identify where the additional Carbon dioxide from China’s coal-burning plants was absorbed – possibly in forests or oceans.

“We need every country on the same page, all pushing for an ambitious, durable, and inclusive agreement that will finally put us on the path toward a global clean-energy future”, Secretary of State John Kerry previously said in a speech, Time reported.