China overtakes US in carbon emissions


By Rafael Epstein
Posted 2 hours 2 minutes ago Updated 1 hour 47 minutes ago

Last year China produced 6.2 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide. (Reuters: Ilya Naymushin)
It seems China has become the world's biggest emitter of carbon dioxide, surpassing the output of the United States.
Experts were predicting the shift would happen by 2009, but it has happened already.
Figures compiled by Dutch government scientists show China produced 6.2 billion tonnes in 2006, compared to nearly 5.8 billion tonnes for the US.
The Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency says the shift has been helped by a 1.4 per cent fall in American emissions, while in the five years to the middle of this decade, China's capacity to generate power grew by 150 per cent.
The British Foreign office envoy on climate change says China is now building 550 coal-fired power stations, cranking them up at the rate of two each week.
Out of all industries, cement production is the biggest emitter. China makes 44 per cent of the world's total cement, so that accounts for 9 per cent of its CO2 emissions.
Senior scientist Dr Jos Olivier, who compiled the figures, says China's booming economy is behind the emissions boost.
"The economy of China has already been increasing very fast for many years," he said.
"They rely to a large extent on coal rather than on the actual gas and oil products, so with those kind of increases it's not so difficult to conclude that their overall emissions must be increasing also quite fast."
He says when people buy products that were made in China, they are helping the country become the world's biggest carbon emitter.
"China's increase in their industry was a significant part aimed at exporting a lot of goods," he said.
"Therefore as long as China takes that large share of the global manufacturing, their industry and manufacturing emissions will stay quite high."
Dr Olivier says China, like every other country, can also in principle do a lot of things to reduce their emissions.
But China says its has less of a responsibility than the developed world.
According to some estimates, 700 million Chinese people live on less than $3 a day and on average their greenhouse gas impact last year was only a quarter that of an American, or half that of someone in Britain.
Dr Olivier says the new figures should prompt the world to tackle a global carbon scheme.
"It will put new pressure on negotiations to discuss a concrete scheme, not maybe specifically for China - when and how and to what extent these other countries should also commit themselves to some kind of CO2 emission mitigation," he said.
Tags: environment, climate-