Column by David Wallace-Wells, New York Times, Sept. 16, 2024
In climate world, something that once seemed almost unthinkable may now be happening. Preliminary data shows that while global carbon emissions are continuing to rise, China’s emissions may already be peaking — the longtime climate villain turning the corner on carbon before the planet as a whole does.
Forecasts like these are not perfectly reliable, but already China has completely rewritten the global green transition story. You may be familiar with the broad strokes of that story: that thanks to several decades of mind-boggling declines in the cost of solar, wind and battery technology, a new wave of climate advocacy and dramatically more policy support, the rollout of various green energy technologies is tracing an astonishing exponential curve upward, each year making a mockery of cautious projections from legacy industry analysts.
But while this is often hailed as a global success, one country has dominated recent progress. When you look at the world outside of China, those eye-popping global curves flatten out considerably — green energy is still moving in the right direction, but much more slowly.
Consider solar power, which is presently dominating the global green transition and giving the world its feel-good story. In 2023, the world including China installed 425 gigawatts of new solar power; the world without China installed only 162 gigawatts. China accounted for 263 gigawatts; the United States accounted for just 33. As recently as 2019, China was installing about one-quarter of global solar capacity additions; last year, it managed 62 percent more than the rest of the world combined. Over those same five years, China grew its amount of new added capacity more than eight times over; the world without China didn’t even double its rate.
Take China out of these figures and the numbers look much less impressive: 90 gigawatts installed in 2019, 93 in 2020, 100 in 2021, 133 in 2022 and 162 in 2023. There has been progress outside of China — a 62 percent increase in new capacity between 2021 and 2023. But in China the increase was 317 percent.
The pattern extends beyond solar. According to one recent estimate, nearly two-thirds of all big solar and wind plants being built globally this year are in China, which is deploying green energy at more than eight times the scale of any other country in the world. Together, all the Group of 7 powers — the United States, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and Britain — managed barely one-quarter as many new installations in 2023 as did China. In 2023, China installed 74 gigawatts of new wind capacity; the rest of the world installed 43 gigawatts, and the United States just 6. In 2023, 8.1 million electric vehicles were sold in China, compared to 5.6 million everywhere else in the world and 1.4 million in America.
There are encouraging stories elsewhere, to be sure. (In the first six months of 2024, Europe produced more electricity from wind and solar than from fossil fuels, for instance, and rooftop solar increased by 349 percent in South Africa in just over a year.) But to the extent that the rest of the world is decarbonizing, China is helping power those transitions, too. In 2022, roughly 90 percent of the solar wafers and solar cells produced in the world were Chinese — by some measures more than twice as many as the rest of the world was even ready to install. Last year, more than 60 percent of the world’s wind turbines were manufactured in China and 60 percent of the world’s E.V. sales came from China. In 2004, the American share of global solar manufacturing was 13 percent, but by 2023, it had fallen below 1 percent. China’s share is now 80 percent; it had been just 1 percent.
Just five years ago, it was commonplace to hear Western climate diplomats complain that even the most miraculous decarbonization in the wealthy world would be worth little if the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, whose country single-handedly produces nearly a third of all emissions, didn’t play ball. Even today, you hear nominally climate-conscious people lament the fact that warming is a worldwide problem with domestic solutions, postulating that the mismatch of local costs and global benefits will disincentivize bad or reluctant climate actors, and sometimes arguing that these dynamics suggest we should slow our roll, as well.
In fact, the competitive logic is now something like the opposite. By some measures, our peer countries and natural allies in Europe are all considerably farther along in their transitions than the United States. And our major geopolitical and geoeconomic rival is not slow-walking its decarbonization, but somewhat leaving the rest of the world in the dust. That doesn’t mean China has solved the world’s climate problem for us — or even its own, given the scale of its ongoing carbon emissions — just that “there is not one single energy transition but a series of regional transitions of widely varying form, pace and scope,” as Brett Christophers argued recently in The Financial Times. “There is an obfuscation involved in talking about ‘the global,’” Adam Tooze has written, “when, in fact, there is one country that dominates the entire dynamic of the energy transition: China.”
A decade ago, an awful lot of intellectual and diplomatic energy was spent on the strategic question of how the United States and its allies might encourage China, then as now the world’s biggest emitter, to join us in the race to decarbonize. Today, U.S. policymakers are throwing up green-tech tariffs to protect American clean-energy industries — a sign that, measuring by price point, we are already losing that race, in addition to losing it as measured by rate of deployment.
China’s massive investments in green tech are both strategic stimulus for a flagging economy in the aftermath of a real-estate bubble and an imperial-scale bet on the importance of clean energy to prosperity and power in the 21st century. A similar logic guides green investment elsewhere, including in the United States, where the Inflation Reduction Act has been called “the world’s largest-ever investment in clean energy technologies.” But if this is a race, China has a commanding lead.
To measure instead by emissions, of course, yields a somewhat different picture. China today produces almost three times as much carbon as the United States, which is the world’s second-worst climate polluter, and towers even more dramatically above the other countries of the world in any tally of present-day damage to the future climate of the planet. But in certain ways this makes China’s green boom even more impressive: The most carbon-hungry economy in world history, during a period of slowing growth short of global “high-income” status, is wagering an enormous amount of its future on nascent energy technologies— and racing well ahead of the global promises it has made about the speed of its own transition. This year, for instance, China hit its 2030 target for total renewable energy six full years early. In the United States, we seem perhaps more focused on artificial intelligence.
You can measure the staggering impact in several ways. Electricity is the currency of the global transition, so to speak, and, last year, the total net growth in global electricity demand was 627 terawatt hours, according to Ember; China on its own added 606 terawatt hours. (A terawatt is one trillion watts.)
Or you can look at what the International Energy Agency calls “avoided emissions” — one way of measuring the impact of new renewables. New solar additions in China accounted for 619 megatons of annual avoided emissions, six times as much as the United States.
These gains partly reflect how dirty China’s legacy energy mix is, of course, since replacing coal reduces more emissions than replacing gas. Nevertheless the contrasts are eye-popping. New wind capacity built in China “avoided” 487 megatons of emissions, according to the I.E.A., while all the wind power elsewhere in the world only cut carbon by 343 megatons. In China, electric cars averted 22 megatons of emissions, more than in the United States (15 megatons), the European Union (14 megatons), Britain (3 megatons) and three times as much as new E.V.s in the rest of the world (7 megatons). Nuclear is a slightly more even race, but even there China avoided more emissions (74 megatons) than South Korea (20 megatons), the United Arab Emirates (15 megatons), the European Union (9 megatons) and the rest of the world (44 megatons).
You can also look at the simple scale of what they are building. China has devoted more than twice as much land to solar plants as the United States has.
What does all this add up to? What does it mean to place China at the incontrovertible center of any story about, or analysis of, the green transition?
The question is an enormous one, perhaps as large as geopolitics and as capacious as the scope of possible global futures. But in the short run, at least, two basic points stand out to me.
The first is that the energy transition is, at present, to a large degree, a Chinese project. There is progress being made around the world, but the gap between China and everybody else is much larger and more intimidating than is widely acknowledged, and the global story looks much less optimistic once you set China aside — which is, in some ways, precisely what America is trying to do by engaging in a green-tech trade war.
Much of the argument for those tariffs has concerned the challenge of Chinese subsidy and “overcapacity” — and what the United States and its allies might do, if anything, to enable us to properly compete with a green economy producing today twice as many solar panels as the world has demand for, as well as an E.V. company taking over the world while mostly posting losses. But another aspect of the imbalance is perhaps more worrying, at least for those of us concerned about the pace of decarbonization: that China might back off, reducing its support for green industry in much the way that it purposefully deflated its own real-estate bubble, somewhat idling the engine of the global green transition and leaving the rest of us in the lurch.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/16/opinion/china-solar-climate.html