China Has More Clean Air Than What You Think

According to the study, some of the figures proposed may not be very reliable as organizations such as the European Union’s Emissions Database for Global Atmospheric Research used default conversion rates that are not applied in China. China is also the world’s largest cement producer, and the new study reevaluated China’s releases of carbon dioxide from cement production as well.

“Since China’s climate commitments are based on this data, it’s crucial that these challenges are recognised and the country’s capacity to account for its emissions strengthened”, Li said. They found it contains 40% less carbon than the so-called “emissions factor” typically used to calculate greenhouse gases produced.

According to this study, fossil-fuels emissions in China are believed to have been 14% lower in 2013 than what researchers believed.

Corinne Le Quéré, director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at the University of East Anglia, said in a statement that there are many uncertainties in Chinese carbon emissions data.

The question also arises whether the claimed overestimate really matters that much, given that national climate plans submitted to the UN are far below what is needed to divert the world from runaway climate change.

“China is the largest coal consumer in the world, but it burns much lower quality coal, such as brown coal, which has a lower heat value and carbon content compared to the coal burned in the US and Europe”, says professor Guan.

However, it is true that 65 percent of China’s overall primary energy consumption is accounted for by coal, which led analysts to doubt the country will fulfill its pledge to cut emissions per unit of GDP so as to drop below 2005 level by 2030.

Is China getting blasted over Global Warming more than it should be?

The study comes as China prepares to negotiate a new climate-change plan at a UN conference in Paris in December.

Because China is among the few countries that keep a vigil eye on its coal qualities through a comprehensive survey, it wasn’t as complicated to integrate this factor in the estimation.

It’s rare to get good news coming out of China on the environmental front, but research by academics at Harvard shows Chinese carbon emissions between 2000 and 2013 were probably 14 per cent lower than previously feared.

“Basically, this is the first time we’ve applied real measurement of the coal quality on a national scale in China”, Dr. Liu said.

Regardless of past totals, the focus should be on reducing emissions, says Wang Yi, deputy director-general of the Institute of Policy and Management at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, who was not involved in the study.

Estimating a country’s carbon dioxide emissions entails some scientific detective work.

“The IPCC emissions factor number needs a revision and that should be at the global level”.