By Sid Perkins
The rapid growth of China’s export-driven economy earlier this decade fueled a dramatic increase in carbon dioxide emissions that overwhelmed the country’s substantial improvement in energy efficiency, a new analysis reveals.
China’s recent economic growth has made the country the world’s third-largest exporter and its fourth-largest economy. It has also made the Asian dynamo, in one sense, the world’s largest polluter: In 2006, China passed the United States to become the world’s largest emitter of carbon dioxide, the most prevalent anthropogenic greenhouse gas.
Between 2002 and 2007, China’s energy consumption nearly doubled, says Glen Peters, a climate scientist at the Center for International Climate and Environmental Research–Oslo. Now Peters and his colleagues have conducted the first detailed analysis indicating which sectors of the Chinese economy most substantially contributed to the dramatic surge in CO2 emissions. The researchers focused on the period between 2002 and 2005, the most recent year for which detailed data are available.
Between 2002 and 2005, China’s production-related CO2 emissions rose by about 46 percent, from 3.4 billion metric tons to about 4.98 billion metric tons, the researchers report in the Feb. 28 Geophysical Research Letters. Population growth and changes in consumer consumption patterns — the mix of products that people living in the country buy — are responsible for only about 3 of those percentage points, Peters notes. Gains in energy efficiency across the spectrum, from upgraded technology in coal-fired power plants to more-efficient home appliances, would actually have decreased the country’s emissions by 21 percent, if all other factors had remained unchanged, the researchers contend. But there’s the rub: During this period, the explosive growth of manufacturing and a widespread construction boom sent CO2 emissions through the roof.