Back in September, Chinese president Xi Jinping garnered a huge amount of attention and no small number of headlines on the global stage when he announced that Beijing’s new five-year plan to bring down the nation’s hefty carbon emissions would be far more ambitious than China had previously promised. In an address to the U.N. General Assembly, President Xi announced that China, home to the second-largest economy in the world, would see peak CO2 emissions by 2030 and bring its carbon footprint all the way down to zero by just 2060–a lofty goal to say the least. The move spawned a flurry of think pieces about China’s motivations and the credibility of these claims. It seems pretty clear that Beijing’s main motivator for curbing emissions is not the environment, but cleaning up China’s energy act and thereby weaning the country off of fossil fuel imports will go a long […]