Carbon emissions in China: How far can new efforts bend the curve?

By Xiliang Zhang, V. Karplus, Tianyu Qi, Da Zhang, Jiankun He. 2016

176 citations recorded by the source corpus.

While China is on track to meet its global climate commitments through 2020, China's post-2020 CO2 emissions trajectory is highly uncertain, with projections varying widely across studies. Over the past year, the Chinese government has announced new policy directives to deepen economic reform, to protect the environment, and to limit fossil energy use in China. To evaluate how new policy directives could affect energy and climate change outcomes, we simulate two levels of policy effort—a continued effort scenario that extends current policies beyond 2020 and an accelerated effort scenario that reflects newly announced policies—on the evolution of China's energy and economic system over the next several decades. We perform simulations using the China-in-Global Energy Model, C-GEM, a bespoke recursive-dynamic computable general equilibrium model with global coverage and detailed calibration of China's economy and future trends. Importantly, we find that both levels of policy effort would bend down the CO2 emissions trajectory before 2050 without undermining economic development. Specifically, in the accelerated effort scenario, we find that coal use peaks around 2020, and CO2 emissions level off around 2030 at 10 bmt, without undermining continued economic growth consistent with China reaching the status of a “well-off society” by 2050.

Subfields: Automotive Engineering, Economics and Econometrics, Environmental Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7b8fe98974e74f68101cd29938d770a6b7eb1237

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In Economics and Econometrics

1. Zeeshan Khan
2. Zhongxiang Zhang
3. S. Paltsev
4. N. Höhne
5. Zhu Sisi
6. Yang Siqun
7. Onno Kuik
8. Yue‐Jun Zhang

In Environmental Engineering

1. Zeeshan Khan
2. Zhongxiang Zhang
3. N. Höhne

Citations in the corpus

• Carbon emissions trading in China: the evolution from pilots to a nationwide scheme (2015, background): “These different contexts have led to the marked variations in design, implementation and enforcement features between China’s carbon emissions trading pilots and other existing emissions trading schemes in the mature market economies (Duan et al., 2014; Munnings et al., 2014; Zhang et al., 2014; Zha”
• Greenhouse gas emissions from current and enhanced policies of China until 2030: Can emissions peak before 2030? (2016, methodology): “Literature shows a wide range of energy-related CO2 emission projections for both current and enhanced policies scenarios (Government of China, 2012; IEA, 2013b, 2014; Jiang et al., 2013; Zhang et al., 2014).”
• Natural gas pricing reform in China: Getting closer to a market system? (2015, background): “A recent study shows that a substantial substitution of natural gas for coal could take place when coal resource tax and/or carbon tax is introduced (Zhang et al., 2015).”
• Environmental regulations an option: Asymmetry effect of environmental regulations on carbon emissions using non-linear ARDL (2018, background): “Moreover, how different environmental legislation has worked so far, especially by achieving their respective goals (Briefing 2013; Cronshaw 2015; Godbole 2016; Zhang et al. 2016; Chen and Stanway 2016; Depuy and Xuan 2016; Carbon 2017; Its and Least 2017).”