China’s carbon dioxide emissions are likely to peak by 2025 — and may even have done so already — according to a new paper that suggests the country’s economic slowdown and transition, combined with rapid adoption of renewable energy, mean previous projections of China’s emissions are far too pessimistic. “The major problem with current models of China’s emissions is that most of them do not pay attention to change in the structure and growth of China’s economic output,” said Fergus Green of the London School of Economics’ Grantham Research Institute, co-author with Lord Stern of the LSE paper to be published this week in the journal Climate Policy.
The new study assumes that even under a “high-growth scenario”, annual economic growth will be just 6 per cent for the coming decade — compared with an average of more than 10 per cent in the first decade of this century. With the slowdown accompanied by a government-planned economic shift from carbon-intensive heavy industry to services, the authors expect a decline of at least 4 per cent in the country’s energy intensity over the next decade.