The world cannot count on them all to do it on their own. China, in particular, looks likely to fail to deliver on the fairly weak pledges it made in Paris. Fortunately, there is a stick available to encourage ambitions to decarbonize: a tariff based on the carbon embedded in the imports into the United States, the European Union and other rich countries.
Ooh okay thank you, that makes way more sense. I should’ve realized when the numbers were so low.
I think China is on track to reducing their emissions way faster than a lot of places, just in the way they prioritize renewables compared to other places. In the cities I went, at least 80% of cars were electric, and non-car vehicles were almost all electric (scooters, rickshaws etc). I believe countrywide over 40% of cars are electric. Living in the US, that blew my mind.
I think the poverty elimination campaign likely contributed to a rise in emissions, because part of their definition of ending extreme poverty included access to electricity, food, clothing, and medical care, all of which require emissions and in rural areas likely achieved by non-renewable energy. And a lot of China is still rural.
It will be interesting to see how they proceed. If they’re able to help poorer countries develop renewable capacity through their use of economies of scale, such as how their recent production of solar has finally brought costs down to what many global south countries can afford, it might prevent those countries from requiring quite so many emissions to develop and help them skip the dirty phase of development and head directly into clean energy, which would be huge. No one will prevent countries from developing, period, so helping that development be sustainable would be massive in terms of saved emissions over them following the example of the rest of the world to do so.