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DUBAI — Just a few years ago, climate watchers had little confidence that China — the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases — would hit peak emissions long “before 2030,” as Beijing had pledged to do.
But China’s economic slowdown and expansion of renewable energies have dramatically altered the calculus. Now a growing number of experts predict China will hit a tipping point much sooner than 2029 and start reducing the carbon pollution it spews into the air.
“It is almost certain that China will peak emissions several years before 2030, perhaps as early as 2026,” said Adair Turner, chair of the Energy Transitions Commission, a think tank focused on climate change mitigation.
Here at the U.N. Climate Change Conference, or COP28, in Dubai, many delegates are quietly debating the implications: Could China really start reducing its greenhouse gas emissions before 2029? And how can other governments nudge the world’s largest emitter toward an earlier peak?
For now, the answer remains elusive. China appears hesitant to update national targets of reaching peak carbon dioxide emission “before 2030” or give in to external pressure to lock in the earliest possible date by halting construction of coal-fired power plants.
China’s shrinking carbon footprint is partly a result of investments in wind and solar power that are replacing coal as an energy source. China is on track to reach a goal of installing 1,200 gigawatts of renewables five years ahead of schedule. At the same time, an economic slowdown, caused primarily by the slumping property market, is expected to reduce activity in the emissions-heavy construction industry.
So why isn’t China advertising the possibility of an early peak? “The Chinese, for whatever reason, are not realizing how important public statements are to winning the overall global debate on climate change,” Turner said. “It would be a very major step forward for the world if they did.”
China has long been on both sides of global efforts to transition the global economy away from fossil fuels to climate-friendly industries.
It makes and deploys technologies crucial to cutting emissions — power from wind, solar, nuclear and hydro. Battery and hybrid cars now account for nearly 40 percent of total sales in the country. The uptake was so fast that China closed more gas stations than it opened last year.
But policymakers in Beijing maintain they cannot meet rising power demand without more coal, which is the leading source of carbon dioxide emissions and a major producer of methane, a far more potent greenhouse gas. And China still makes over half of the world’s steel, aluminum and cement — all of which contribute significantly to emissions.
“The story over the last decade has been that China simply needed a lot of energy, so even as they do record-breaking clean energy deployment, the growth in energy demand was faster still,” said Alex Wang, an expert on Chinese climate policy at the University of California at Los Angeles. The way to truly move away from coal, he added, is for “renewables to become so powerful that they start to take over.”
Several experts on China’s energy sector now say that fundamental shift is within reach — as long as Chinese policymakers continue to push its economy away from polluting industries.
If the world’s largest emitter resists using carbon-intensive stimulus to boost growth, and instead continues to invest in clean technologies, it could send emissions into what one analyst described as “structural decline.”
But, campaigners warn, the ongoing construction of coal-fired power plants could upend the chances of an imminent reduction if it slows the adoption of renewables. China defends the expansion as necessary for energy security and recently announced a policy that Chinese researchers say will allow the plants to operate only when necessary to keep the grid intact and prevent blackouts.
The investment in coal has continued in part because of recent power shortages, including during droughts that tanked hydropower output in 2022. But to keep relying on coal would mean “paying a very high cost for energy security,” said Ma Jun, director the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs, a Chinese nongovernmental organization.
A better solution, Ma said, would be to better integrate the nation’s power grids and improve coordination of renewables use, rather than pushing each region to be self-sufficient. Ensuring power supply should be a “national game of chess, but instead it’s everyone for themselves,” he said.
There is also the question of how aggressively China will move to bring down emissions after the peak. While many analyses project China to hit maximum emissions by the mid-2020s, it is unclear what could follow. It is possible that carbon dioxide output will “stay at a plateau, fluctuate for an extended period, or decline as people wish,” said Hu Min, head of the Institute for Global Decarbonization Progress, a Chinese think tank.
Few of those questions look likely to be answered during this year’s climate negotiations. This is the first time in three years that China has sent a major delegation to climate talks. In 2021 and 2022, only a skeleton team attended, because of the country’s strict “zero covid” policies.
Even so, China has mostly kept a low profile. Instead of attending or sending his No. 2, Premier Li Qiang, President Xi Jinping dispatched Ding Xuexiang, a vice premier who oversees the environmental portfolio.
Neither Ding nor Xie Zhenhua — a special envoy and the international face of China’s climate negotiations for the past three decades — has made major announcements during talks. Instead, they have focused on what China has already achieved.
Reflecting a long-standing wait-and-see approach to climate diplomacy, Beijing did not sign up for voluntary pledges on renewables and nuclear, even though it is a global leader in both sectors.
“China is very rigorous, and its policymakers, including negotiations at COP, are cautious about signing onto something before they know it’s achievable,” said Shuang Liu, China finance lead at the World Resources Institute.
One of the few announcements Xie made last week was confirmation that China would release updated five- and ten-year climate targets in 2025. But that pledge also left open the possibility that no changes would be made for at least another year and that the 2030 target remains broadly similar.
“The way it was framed, it could be that for 2030 they just announce new initiatives rather than new goals,” said Kate Logan, associate director of climate at the Asia Society Policy Institute, a think tank. “There is nothing in there that guaranteed a raising of ambition.”
China probably will be unwilling to bind itself to additional public targets beyond what it agreed to in a joint statement with the United States in November, when it pledged to triple renewables over the decade to 2030 with a mind to “meaningful absolute power sector emission reduction” this decade.
In a news conference this week, U.S. climate envoy John F. Kerry called that statement a “move from where we have been” in negotiations with China.
Asked about Kerry’s remarks, a State Department spokesperson said that the agreement reached in Sunnylands, Calif., in November was the “first time that the [People’s Republic of China] has stated plans to achieve absolute emissions reductions in the power sector this decade, consistent with the possibility that China can reach its overall peak CO2 goal earlier.”
But that breakthrough appears to now be constraining Chinese ambition. In meetings with delegations from the United States in Dubai, Xie has repeatedly stressed that he wishes to implement, rather than build on, the Sunnylands agreement.
“China really wants to use the [U.S.-China] deal to guide negotiations as they reach the endgame,” while former officials from United States have argued that those commitments should be the “floor” for Chinese commitments, said one person involved in closed-door talks, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations.
Asked at a Saturday news conference about the possibility of an updated target, Xie said that China “did not need to adjust [national targets] to reflect the progress we’ve made, because the word we used is ‘before’ 2030.”
“As for which year exactly,” he added, “we are doing some calculations.”