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 way toward shoring up the nation’s energy independence and energy security, which ranks as one of the nation’s top priorities. Despite these lofty goals and even loftier rhetoric, however, China has yet to put it’s money where its mouth is when it comes to coal, which is seeing an uptick in some cash-strapped regions. And, further underlining the nation’s real bottom line when it comes to lowering carbon emissions, China has been building up coal-fired capacity overseas. In fact, China has been ramping up a whole lot of energy production capacity overseas, and especially in largely untapped markets in developing countries, to expand its energy and geopolitical influence.
Just last week, President Xi appeared to double down on China’s already lofty emissions curbing targets, claiming that China will cut carbon emissions by over 65% by 2030. “China will lower its carbon dioxide emissions per unit of GDP [gross domestic product] by over 65 percent from the 2005 level, increase the share of non-fossil fuels in primary energy consumption to around 25 percent, increase the forest stock volume by 6 billion cubic meters from the 2005 level, and bring its total installed capacity of wind and solar power to over 1.2 billion kilowatts,” Xi was quoted as saying by Chinese state-owned and -run news outlet Xinhua.
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