After yesterday, we thought you might need something upbeat, so here’s some good news on global climate action (that deniers are, unsurprisingly, choosing to ignore).
Despite the bilateral agreement to reduce emissions between China and the US and China’s early sign-on to the Paris Agreement, deniers have yet to update their talking points about the developing country’s emissions justifying complacency here in the US.
What’s the point of the US sacrificing, they ask rhetorically, if China continues to use coal in increasing quantities? This is a nonsense argument even if true, because even if our emission reductions were cancelled out by China’s growth, that would still mean less carbon pollution than if both nations continued unabated. But it is increasingly looking like China isn’t going to be the cause of climate catastrophe at all. In fact, it is quickly staking out a position of climate leadership, in part perhaps due to strong public support for renewables, which they are cutting down on coal plants to make more room for.
But the cleanest megawatt is the one that isn’t used, making energy efficiency a key component of climate action. As a new IEA report shows, China poured $370 billion dollars into energy efficiency programs between 2006 and 2014. In total, it’s efforts have saved nearly 500 gigawatts, about the same amount as the renewable energy it has installed. And it looks like it is ramping up efforts as last year it reduced its energy intensity by 5.6%, an improvement over its already impressive 3.1% from the previous decade. Globally, energy intensity fell 1.8% last year, which is half of what is necessary to meet the Paris goal of keeping warming well below 2°C. In other words, China’s doing double what every other nation needs to do in order for energy efficiency to meet its share of the 2°C goal.
At the same time, China’s also driving forward on electric vehicles. On average so far in 2016, China has installed an impressive 170 charging stations every day. Again, it is ramping up efforts, as the 31,000 stations installed this year represent 65% more than last year. It’s going to need these chargers, as a new study suggests that by 2030 as much as 60% of Chinese cars could be electric. With sustained effort, China is capable of installing more EV chargers in the next five years than the rest of the world combined!
With this and even more good news from China, perhaps a celebratory drink is in order. And now that beer production by-products can be used to produce batteries, we can even feel good about that!
Cheers!
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