Energy and Emissions Data

Shenzhen, a city of 11 million people just north of Hong Kong, has announced that it will begin emission trading on June 17. Shenzhen is one of the seven Chinese cities and provinces that have been developing pilot programs for carbon emissions trading.

China’s State Council in late January approved an “energy consumption control target” to keep the country’s total energy consumption below the equivalent of 4 billion tonnes of coal per year by 2015.

The latest International Energy Agency’s (IEA) Medium-Term Coal Market Report 2012 re-confirms the dangerous path the world is on–a path of increasing dependence on coal, which carries serious environmental risks for people and the planet. According to the report, the world will burn 1.2 billion metric tons more coal per year by 2017 compared to today, surpassing oil as the world’s top energy source.

The Chinese Government recently announced the long-awaited provincial energy consumption data for 2011. The data shows that China’s energy intensity in 2011 was 0.793 tons coal equivalent (tce) per unit gross domestic product (GDP), 2.01% less than 2010. The data also reveals new opportunities and challenges for achieving China’s energy intensity target under the Twelfth Five-Year Plan (12FYP) (2011-2015).

ChinaFAQs expert Angel Hsu and her colleagues from the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy team up with Columbia University, Chinese Academy for Environmental Planning and City University of Hong Kong for this report to help guide effective pollution control and natural resource management.

The UN Climate Conference in Durban, South Africa, concluded over the weekend with a consensus to negotiate an agreement that will include all major emitters of warming gases. The conference agreed to a second commitment period for the Kyoto Protocol, extended the work of the group for Long-term Cooperative Action, and most significantly established new negotiations under the Durban Platform. Launching these negotiations was hailed as major progress around the world (Bloomberg, The Statesman, Xinhua). For the first time the world’s three major emitters (by total amount of greenhouse gases emitted), China, the United States and India, have agreed to begin negotiations for an international “protocol, another legal instrument or an agreed outcome with legal force,” indicating that there will be actions and efforts by all countries. (For the implications of this complex legal wording, see my colleague Jake Werksman’s discussion on WRI Insights).

The idea of a total cap on energy consumption in China, first suggested last March before the National People’s Congress has reemerged in Durban, and surprisingly there are now suggestions that China might consider some kind of a cap on carbon emissions. This has been suggested apparently as part of domestic policy rather than as a negotiating position, but details are very sketchy.

When China launched its first official pavilion at a UN climate conference on Sunday, UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Secretariat Cristiana Figueres was there alongside China’s NDRC Vice Minister Xie Zhenhua to cut the ribbon. Swarmed by journalists in the standing-room only conference center of the China pavilion in Durban, Figueres applauded China for being a “trend-setter” in global renewable energy, resonating around the world and during the first week of climate negotiations in Durban.