China will aim to ensure its greenhouse gas emissions stop rising by 2050, the Financial Times reports a senior climate official as saying.
Su Wei, director-general of climate change at China’s National Development and Reform Commission, told the FT that China accepted that it could not continue to allow emissions to rise without limit. However, Su reiterated that China would not subordinate its economic growth, and efforts to lift living standards, to climate considerations and said it was too early to start setting hard caps on emissions.
This is the first official mention of any hard target date for China’s emission reduction efforts. But it appears well short of what scientists say is required collectively around the world to ensure global warming is restricted to 2 degrees Celsius above pre-Industrial levels – average global cuts in emissions of 50 per cent by 2050.
China and the United States are the key players in attempts to forge, by the end of 2009 in Copenhagen, a new UN global climate treaty needed to meet such goals.
Su’s comments come at the same time as the release of a new study by high-ranking climate researchers that says the country can afford policies to see emissions peaking much earlier than 2050, Reuters reports.
Experts from the Energy Research Institute and the State Council Development Research Center say in their "2050 China Energy and C02 Emissions Report" that its reasonable for China to pursue a slowing in emissions growth to achieve a peak in emissions by 2030. By 2050, carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels could be cut back to 2005 levels, the report says.
They call for early decisions to set targets to, first, lower emissions relative to business as usual, and then reduce them in absolute terms. The report also acknowledges that China is now the world’s largest greenhouse emitter.
Financial Times 14/8/09, Reuters 16/8/09
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2050 China Energy and C02 Emissions Report summary Reuters
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