China Environmental Law

The fact that China has surpassed the US in total CO2 emissions is old news.  There is no doubt that China’s carbon emissions are big and getting bigger.  Over the past “eight years, global carbon dioxide emissions have grown more than a third to 11.4 billion tons a year. Two-thirds of that has come from China.” 

In the individual apparatus events, however, China has taken another gold medal. The Washington Post reported yesterday that China’s power-sector carbon emissions are set to top the US this year.  That’s not at all surprising and follows logically from China’s assumption of the total carbon crown.  “Worldwide, power generation accounts for 37 percent of energy-related carbon dioxide emissions and 27 percent of all carbon emissions.”

The Post article is based on data compiled by Carbon Monitoring for Action (CARMA).  CARMA is “produced and financed by the Confronting Climate Change Initiative at the Center for Global Development, an independent and non-partisan think tank located in Washington, DC” and consists of

a massive database containing information on the carbon emissions of over 50,000 power plants and 4,000 power companies worldwide. Power generation accounts for 40% of all carbon emissions in the United States and about one-quarter of global emissions. CARMA is the first global inventory of a major, emissions-producing sector of the economy.

Check out their China page here.  They have carbon emissions broken down by plant, region, and operating company.  Nice resource!

The one surprising element in the report is that

Chinese power plants will produce about 3.1 billion tons of CO2 this year, up from about 2.3 billion tons in 2007. U.S. power plants are expected to produce about 2.8 billion tons of CO2 this year, about the same as last year.

In other words, China’s power-sector carbon emissions have increased by over one third from 2007 to 2008.  Since carbon is not a regulated pollutant in China (or the US for that matter), this isn’t a question of lack of enforcement with existing laws.  So it means that increases in carbon emissions should but be based solely on net increases in operational generation capacity.  Will China’s coal-fried power sector increase capacity by over one third in 2008 over 2007?  That number seems high to me. 

 Just to keep things in perspective, here are the per capita numbers:

Electricity usage [in the US] produces about 9.5 tons of CO2 per person, compared with 2.4 tons per person in China, 0.6 in India and 0.1 in Brazil.

I think I gave up those plans for an Ark too quickly at the end of Monday’s toad strangler, but then it looks like several people are a couple steps ahead of me:

[See here for story] 

or, in slightly less fantastical version, this Dutch conception:

Photo Credit: Waterstudio