China: Total Carbon Dioxide Emissions

Introduction

China is the world's most populous country, with over 1,311,000,000 (1.311 billion) people as of 2006, about a fifth of the world's population. It is also one of the world's largest emitters of carbon dioxide (CO₂). The United States was the world's largest emitter of CO₂ and other greenhouse gases for most of the twentieth century, but in 2007 the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency, an arm of the Dutch government, announced that China had become the world's leading CO₂ emitter. Because China's population is more than four times that of the United States, each American is still creating several times more greenhouse gas than is being emitted for each Chinese person.

Historical Background and Scientific Foundations

Greenhouse gas emissions are caused primarily by deforestation and the burning of fossil fuels. Fuel-burning in cars, industrial factories, and electrical power plants is associated with industrialization, which is defined as the changeover of a nation's economy from agriculture to

mechanized manufacturing. Industrialization began in Europe in the late 1700s and transformed life in Europe and the United States in the nineteenth century, spreading to Japan and other parts of the world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

China was a latecomer to this economic change, with major industrialization beginning only after World War II and proceeding slowly and erratically until about 1990. Since then, China's economy has expanded quickly into car manufacturing, aerospace, electronics, and many other areas. Much of the world's product manufacturing now occurs there, and more Chinese people (still a minority) are driving cars and seeking consumer luxuries. China's economy grew by 11% in the first quarter of 2007 alone. This rapid industrialization has led to a rapid rise in the amount of greenhouse gas, especially carbon dioxide, emitted by China.

In 2005, China's CO₂ emissions were still about 2% below those of the United States. In 2006, the world's total CO₂ emissions increased by about 2.6%. Most of this increase was caused by a 4.5% increase in the amount of coal-burning, about two-thirds of which is attributed to China. China builds, on average, about one coal-fired electric power plant every four days. China's CO₂ emissions increased by 8.7% in 2006 to approximately 6,830 million standard U.S. tons (6,200 million metric tons) per year. The United States's greenhouse gas-emissions decreased by about 1.3% in 2006. As a result, China emitted about 8% more CO₂ than the United States in 2006. European greenhouse gas emissions remained approximately level in 2005 to 2006.

American and Chinese scientists writing in the journal Science in 2001 claimed that China's CO₂ emissions actually decreased by 7.3% from 1996 to 2000 because of economic setbacks and reforms in the government-owned coal and energy industries. If this decrease did occur, it has since been swept away by massive increases.

Most of China's CO₂ production is from coal-burning; about 9% is from the manufacture of cement. A significant fraction comes from out-of-control underground coal fires, which burn between 100 and 200 million tons of coal yearly, accounting for 2 to 3% of all the CO₂ released by fossil-fuel burning in the world. It is difficult to measure the extent of such coal fires precisely, but they may have accounted for about a fifth of China's greenhouse gas emissions as of 2006.

Impacts and Issues

International disputes over greenhouse emissions by China and other developing countries have made it impossible, so far, to achieve global legal agreement on a strategy for mitigating climate change. China argues that because the United States and European countries were able to develop their economies for generations without restraining their greenhouse gas emissions, those countries should be required to restrain their emissions more stringently than China and other countries that are only now industrializing.

WORDS TO KNOW

DEFORESTATION: Those practices or processes that result in the change of forested lands to non-forest uses. This is often cited as one of the major causes of the enhanced greenhouse effect for two reasons: 1) the burning or decomposition of the wood releases carbon dioxide; and 2) trees that once removed carbon dioxide from the atmosphere in the process of photosynthesis are no longer present and contributing to carbon storage.

FOSSIL FUELS: Fuels formed by biological processes and transformed into solid or fluid minerals over geological time. Fossil fuels include coal, petroleum, and natural gas. Fossil fuels are non-renewable on the timescale of human civilization, because their natural replenishment would take many millions of years.

GREENHOUSE GASES: Gases that cause Earth to retain more thermal energy by absorbing infrared light emitted by Earth's surface. The most important greenhouse gases are water vapor, carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and various artificial chemicals such as chlorofluorocarbons. All but the latter are naturally occurring, but human activity over the last several centuries has significantly increased the amounts of carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide in Earth's atmosphere, causing global warming and global climate change.

INDUSTRIALIZATION: Shift of a large portion of a region or country's economy to mechanized manufacturing and away from agriculture. Industrialization has been an increasingly global process since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, usually dated to about 1750.

KYOTO PROTOCOL: Extension in 1997 of the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), an international treaty signed by almost all countries with the goal of mitigating climate change. The United States, as of early 2008, was the only industrialized country to have not ratified the Kyoto Protocol, which is due to be replaced by an improved and updated agreement starting in 2012.

The United States has replied that China's economy is already competitive and that, as a matter of economic fairness, any greenhouse gas emission agreements must apply equally to all nations. (Most other industrialized countries have signed the Kyoto Protocol, the only international legal instrument so far which seeks to constrain greenhouse gas emissions.) In 1997, the year before the Kyoto Protocol was opened for signatures, the United States Senate unanimously passed the Byrd-Hagel Resolution (S. Res. 98), which stated that the United States would not be signatory to the Kyoto Protocol or any other agreements that “mandate new commitments to limit or reduce greenhouse gas emissions for” the United States and other developed nations “unless the protocol or other agreement also mandates new specific scheduled commitments to limit or reduce greenhouse gas emissions for Developing Country Parties within the same compliance period.”

See Also Asia: Climate Change Impacts; China: Climate and Energy Policies.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Periodicals

Jiang, Wenran. “Beijing's ‘New Thinking’ on Energy Security.” Jamestown Foundation China Brief 6 (April 12, 2006). Also available at < http://jamestown.org/china_brief/article.php?articleid=2373181>.

Schiermeier, Quirin. “China Struggles to Square Growth and Emissions.” Nature 446 (2007): 954–956.

Streets, David G., et al. “Recent Reductions in China's Greenhouse Gas Emissions.” Science 294 (2001): 1835–1837

Web Sites

“China Now No. 1 in CO₂ Emissions; USA in Second Position.” Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency, June 22, 2007. < http://www.mnp.nl/en/dossiers/Climatechange/moreinfo/Chinanowno1inCO2emissionsUSAinsecondposition.html> (accessed August 5, 2007).

Larry Gilman