China is no stranger to climate change and pollution. The country of 1.4 billion is regarded as the world’s largest polluter, a title which was achieved relatively quickly given that the country only began to industrialize in the 1970s. This high level of pollution, along with climatologists raising the alarm about the dire consequences of unchecked climate change, have pushed China to reanalyze its approach to maintaining an industrialized economy.
In 2016, China signed on to the Paris climate accord, pledging that its annual emissions would peak in 2030 before making a steady decline. While some climatologists have previously criticized the accord for having no means to back up the promises made, President Xi Jinping’s Sept. 22 announcement that China would become carbon neutral by 2060 signals that these doubts may have been somewhat unwarranted.
A History of Pollution
Smog over Shanghai in 2010. Samuel Straker. CC BY-NC 2.0.
To date, China is the world’s largest producer of carbon dioxide. In 2018, the country emitted over 10 million metric tons of the pollutant which heavily contributes to rising global temperatures. Fossil fuels currently comprise 85% of the nation’s energy sources, with the remaining 15% coming from renewables.
Such a high level of emissions did not appear overnight. Since China began its transition from an agrarian society to an industrial one in the 1970s, the world’s most populous country has seen a booming economy at the cost of polluted skies. Cities like Beijing are known to have some of the worst air quality in the world.
These high levels of pollution have not just created smog in the skies of some of the world’s largest metropolitan areas. Between 1980 and 2018, sea levels along China's coastal areas rose by 3.3 meters annually. This threatens to displace nearly 64 million people living in China’s coastal regions if sea levels continue to rise at this rate. Likewise, several studies have linked China’s air pollution to increased deaths due to respiratory and cardiovascular disease.
Making Carbon Neutrality a Reality
An aerial view of the Three Gorges Dam, which is located along the Yangtze River. Euclid vanderKroew. CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.
On Sept. 22, President Jinping made a pledge during the annual U.N. General Assembly meeting to enact new environmental policies and regulations so that China will become “carbon neutral” by 2060.
“China will scale up its Intended Nationally Determined Contributions by adopting more vigorous policies and measures,” Jinping said during his speech. “We aim to have CO2 emissions peak before 2030 and achieve carbon neutrality before 2060. We call on all countries to pursue innovative, coordinated, green and open development for all, seize the historic opportunities presented by the new round of scientific and technological revolution and industrial transformation, achieve a green recovery of the world economy in the post-COVID era and thus create a powerful force driving sustainable development.”
While Jinping did not outline specific actions that the nation will take to curb its annual emissions, experts believe that the move toward carbon neutrality will be both beneficial for the health of the planet as well as for China’s economy in the long run. China already exports billions in clean energy technology abroad, primarily to developing Middle Eastern countries. This trend is expected to continue with Jinping’s goal, and will likely galvanize other countries to make similar changes.
A Global Effort to Combat Climate Change
Former U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry signing the Paris Agreement on behalf of the United States on Earth Day, 2016. Thomas Cizauskas. CC PDM 1.0.
While China may arguably be the most important country to make a carbon neutrality pledge, 60 others made similar promises in 2019. Notably excluded from the list were the United States and India, the second and third largest polluters behind China. According to The New York Times, the 60 countries which pledged to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050 “can either have ‘plans to achieve net zero [carbon dioxide] emissions by 2050’ or have it as ‘a long-term national goal.’”
While a noteworthy goal, the 60 countries which signed on to the pledge account for only 11% of all global emissions. Many nations that agreed on carbon neutrality, such as the Maldives, the Bahamas and the Marshall Islands, already retain small carbon footprints but are at the highest risk for adverse effects due to climate change.
While the United States has not made any similar pledges and began to withdraw from the Paris climate accord in 2019, several states and municipalities have made their own pledges. Notably, both New York and California made their own plans to work toward carbon neutrality over the next three decades.
The European Union has also seen some progress in achieving a greener future, although this has come with some bumps in the road. Last month, an EU commission in charge of the union’s 2050 carbon neutrality goal was accused of cheating by choosing to invest more in “carbon sinks,” efforts to remove carbon from the air by planting new forests, rather than divesting from fossil fuels at large.
As of yet, no major polluting country has made substantive changes in divesting from fossil fuels and transitioning toward a more green economy. However, should China’s latest proposal be implemented, it is likely that other countries will soon follow suit.
Jacob Sutherland
is a recent graduate from the University of California San Diego where he majored in Political Science and minored in Spanish Language Studies. He previously served as the News Editor for The UCSD Guardian, and hopes to shed light on social justice issues in his work.