So we have. I feel like a broken man did not made very much coming to the office all afternoon,
my name is Sam because I lead the work here on the economics of Planetary Health funded by the Rockefeller Foundation.
And over the years, I worked on climate policy.
There seems to be a constant engagement with this organisation called NRDC and is a fantastic organisation based in the US working in lots of places.
And today we're going to hear about one of those big places,
which is so significant in this area of planetary health or climate change, or we can call it a number of things.
So it's a great, great privilege to have Barbara Fenimore here.
Barbara's I'm going to talk about whether China will save the planet seems the
ambitious thing to explain or find out whether it's true or false in the next hour.
But we need to hear about it, don't we? Because there's China as a state itself.
What does it do with its own people, its own resources, natural resources and financial resources to reduce the fact that air pollution kills over a
million people a year and a huge mortality driven by bad planetary health practises in China?
We were talking about the damages of the fertiliser subsidies in China.
We can't quite grasp the numbers at the moment,
but we know if China could modify its fertiliser and agricultural practises that would have a global impact on emissions.
But it's not just China, isn't it is China, the United States, India,
three big players and they came together with 190 other countries in Paris in 2015 and reached an agreement.
That agreement was constituted over the nationally determined contributions.
Those contributions that all the countries could make and countries have gone away since since 2015 have been trying to get those underway.
We see that in the, you know, in the U.K., in the changes in our energy mixture.
It makes the new ambitions to go to net zero, which is, of course, fantastic.
But how does this play out in other countries in particular? We're going to hear about that from China today.
But of course, for us here in Oxford or in the U.K. or in the United States, a lot of people are quite grumpy about China.
Mr Trump is probably the grumpy person about China, but so is my brother in law.
My brother in law lives in a very small village in the east coast of England in Suffolk.
And he says, why should I change my behaviour when China's building a power station every week?
We haven't been ascertaining whether that number that Barbara puts in her book for a period of time.
I think 10 years ago, which direction it's going.
But is it actually building a power station in China or across the region in the scheme known as the Belt and Road Initiative?
So we need to look at China at home. We need to look at China abroad and look at China in the world.
And so it's great to have you here. Barbara, you worked on China for nearly 30 years, so we couldn't ask for a better expert.
You'll be talking about your book. I've I've read it today, so it's a wonderful and accessible read.
There are some copies at the back which you people should buy until they've all gone.
But please, please do that and please do stay afterwards.
So for a drink as well, so but to kind of round off the conversation, there isn't totally going to get stuck in China.
We're very lucky to have radical because the radical is also part in our DC tribe and
spent five years developing the India programme of an Odyssey number of years ago,
but is here now based, based.
Based in Oxford, as a research director of the Oxford India Centre and part of an upcoming Oxford Martin School programme on the future of cooling.
So it's fantastic to have you back here with us today.
So we're going to go over to Barbara now here from her radical and Barbara have a bit of a conversation and we'll open up for questions after that.
So I'd like to welcome you both. Thank you very much.
Thank you so much, Sam and Radhika and everyone else at the Oxford Martin School who made it possible for me to be here today,
and especially thanks to so many of you for spending a lovely afternoon on this very important topic.
We are at the cusp of a paradigm shift in energy, global energy that is as profound as the shift from burning biofuels to coal.
Over two centuries ago.
But we're also living in an era of rapidly accelerating climate change, a climate emergency, as the UK parliament has just declared.
We must act now to cut our emissions in half within the next 10 to 12 years to have
any hope of limiting the impacts of climate change to mostly survivable levels.
And to do so will require a shift in our global economy and our energy systems.
That is unprecedented in scope and speed and scale.
So the question is how do these two major paradigm shifts intersect?
Can we move ahead with clean energy fast enough to avoid the worst impacts of climate change the world?
And we are at a crossroads. And right in the centre of that crossroad is China.
When I first moved to China in 1990, winter meant coal every year on November 15th on the dot.
Regardless of the weather, the government of Beijing and other large cities would switch on the heating system powered by coal and instantly,
instantly our faces would darken and we'd start to cough.
And this is what I would say when I looked out my window the coal piles that people used for heating and cooking,
so they piled them up right outside of their homes.
And in Beijing itself, I could see from my window the smokestacks of four major coal plants and the largest steel mill in the country,
right within the limits of Beijing. All of those are gone now.
But the problems largely remain. Two years after I arrived in Beijing, I was present at the emergence of China on the international climate stage.
It actually began in Beijing in a crowded ballroom in the Cleveland Hotel.
The premier at the time, Li Peng,
had invited ministers from 40 different developing countries to come to Beijing and work out a joint strategy for negotiating the Framework.
Convention on Climate Change and the principles that they came up with at this meeting were enshrined in something called the Beijing Declaration.
And many of them made their way into the framework convention,
most notably the idea of common but differentiated responsibilities for developed and developing countries.
China held firm to that through the Copenhagen climate negotiations and blocked real progress
in coming up with global top-down limits on CO2 emissions because of that principle.
And the Premier at the time was widely blamed for the failure of the Copenhagen Agreement to reach a global climate targets.
Yet just a few years later in Paris. China was widely credited with playing a very positive role and through a series
of bilateral climate agreements with the second largest emitter in the world,
the United States. Really developed the momentum for reaching the Paris Agreement and also the speed with which it entered into force.
Now these are the indices that China committed to at the Paris Agreement nationally determined contributions.
And I might say the second one, which was widely considered to be very ambitious, to raise the percentage of non-fossil energy to 20 percent by 2030.
That includes nuclear, high, large hydro and other things that we don't always call renewable energy.
And in a draught renewable energy document that came out a few months ago,
China is now considering raising that second target to 35 percent by 2030 and not just non-fossil, but just renewable energy.
That's how fast it's grown. But now that the U.S. has retreated from the climate scene, the question arises,
will try to take the reins and try to save the planet, can try to be a leader in global climate mitigation.
And to answer that question, as I explained in my book, requires an understanding of the economic and political context that China operates in.
And the fundamental obstacles to its low carbon transition that it faces and is grappling with now,
and also the powerful vested interests that are standing in the way.
But one thing is clear to me that China plays an outside role not only in terms of CO2 emissions,
of which it is by far the world's largest contributor,
but also in the outside role outsized role that it is playing in catalysing that very clean energy revolution that I talked about in the beginning.
And to discuss this, there's a lot to talk about.
I'm going to only focus on four main issues key issues coal, renewable energy, electric vehicles and green finance.
So in 2006, China overtook the US with the dubious honour of being the world's largest emitter of CO2,
though it is important to note that China's per capita emissions are still less than half those of the United States,
similar per capita emissions to the EU and lower cumulative emissions than either the US or the EU, though it is catching up fast.
And the main reason for China's large CO2 emissions is coal.
Coal is responsible for about 80 percent of China's CO2 emissions.
And if CO2 emissions in China were a separate country,
it would have the number two emissions in the world after China itself and ahead of any other country.
Now what caused this rapid growth starting in 2001?
Well, that was the year that China entered the WTO and became the manufacturing centre of the world.
During that first decade, it witnessed the most amazing economic miracle that had ever been seen in the world.
It quadrupled its GDP. It nearly quintupled its exports, and it tripled its coal consumption.
It was all powered by coal. And at that time, China was also in the middle of building the largest urban area in the world,
and it still is the largest construction site that the world has ever seen.
So that's the reason why. But if you look here, you'll see that last couple of years coal use has.
Dropped or begun to drop. That is remarkable.
Why is that? It's because starting in the mid 2000s,
China began to realise that its development model based on exports based on heavy
industry powered by coal and just continuing its economic growth was no longer enough
to guarantee the quality of life for its citizens and that this path was simply
unsustainable and was leaving a trail of environmental devastation in its wake.
And things came to a head in 2013. That was the year known by many as China's air apocalypse, when instead of fog,
people began to get information about how high the levels of actual pollutants were.
And public concern began to soar. People were wearing face masks outside hospital admissions, reach levels never seen before.
And some estimates were that 4000 people were dying from air pollution every day.
So by the end of that year, 2013, China had launched a one point seven trillion renminbi programme.
Air Pollution Control, an action plan targeting coal consumption in its most polluted regions along in populated regions along the eastern seaboard.
That was also the year that my organisation, NRDC had.
We had brought together a group of 20 major Chinese stakeholders, research institutes, academic experts and so on,
and managed to put together a proposal for a national cap on coal consumption that was included in the 13th Five-Year Plan as a mandatory cap.
So the results of that, those efforts at air pollution control plant, the coal cap and others policies subsidies,
a whole range of steps that China took to cut its air pollution primarily,
but also to cut its CO2 emissions because the same basic cause is for both is coal.
The results were quite impressive.
The following year after the apocalypse, after going up double digits, China's coal use was essentially flat for the first time since then.
Economic miracle began, and for the next two years, 2014 through 2016, it actually began to go down.
That meant, of course, that China's CO2 emissions went down.
And because China is such a major player in terms of CO2 emissions, this last year,
it was responsible for 29 percent of global emissions when China's emissions went down.
Global CO2 emissions also stabilised for those three years, even as the global economy continued to grow.
Some people even thought that China may have already peaked its coal consumption and its CO2 emissions.
But unfortunately, that's not the case. And in 2017, and even more so this past year, coal consumption has begun to rise in China again.
China's CO2 emissions have begun to rise three percent this year, and unfortunately, that plays a major role in global CO2 emissions.
Also growing this past year by two percent. We cannot afford this continued growth.
But the question in everyone's mind is, is this a blip or is this a long term trend?
And to answer that question really illustrates something I said earlier,
which is what are the fundamental obstacles that China faces in trying to decarbonise?
Who are the stakeholders that are standing in the way the powerful vested interests and some of the ones that I have identified are,
in fact, local governments, local governments whose leaders are still pretty much rated primarily by how well
they grow their GDP and their local GDP and their economies were built on coal.
Their jobs primarily were derived from the coal industry and from heavy industry.
And so when the government tried to cut back on coal use in these provinces, local governments resisted.
But then inexplicably, in 2014, the government decided to delegate approval for new coal plants to local governments,
thinking they would have a better idea of what capacity was needed. Well, can you imagine the result?
A glut of new coal plant approvals, even though they were none of them were needed.
And because of the way China's power system is set up,
any new coal plant that comes in is guaranteed a certain number of operating hours and is
guaranteed similar to every other coal plant and guaranteed a fixed price for their electricity.
So with more coal plants, you bring on board the less profit that you have.
And so the government has tried to cut back on that willy nilly growth of coal plants in the past couple of years.
But then the big problem now is the economic slowdown in China.
The trade wars between the US and China do play a very important role,
but that's not by any means the only reason and the Chinese government is once again
resorting to these same measures that worked before in the 2008 global economic recession.
They are supporting more infrastructure, more coal powered,
highly polluting infrastructure rather than using a stimulus to promote more green jobs, more transition to clean energy.
So that is a second reason why we're seeing a real growth again here.
Hopefully, China can find its way to what it says,
where it says it wants to go to the new normal of slower but higher quality
economic growth that protects the environment and the health of its citizens.
Just a few weeks ago, my organisation and those 20 other Chinese stakeholder groups came out with a report,
the mid-term evaluation of the cold cap policy and looked at all the things China we recommend
that China does to get a handle and on its coal consumption to bring it back where it needs to be,
where China says it wants to be. So here are some of the key recommendations that we have made.
I will just highlight two of them.
One is power sector reform because the all the rules of the power sector were developed at a time when all China wanted to
do was to build new coal plants as fast as possible to power its growing industrial sector because it wasn't succeeding.
There was strong, widespread outages. So the rules of the game still favour coal fired power.
So power sector reform and here are some of the examples China has been working on for some time.
But the powers that would be the losers from that type of power sector reform are dragging their feet.
The second major focus that we recommend is something that China also has done very well globally on, but in recent years has has given less priority.
That is energy efficiency. There is so much wastage of energy in China's system.
Even though China, by its own lights,
says that it's responsible for two thirds of the improvements in energy efficiency over the last two decades of its energy intensity,
that's the amount of energy it uses to produce.
One unit of GDP is still far below the world average,
and we've been to factories all over China and have seen how low cost no cost measures can save
energy much more quickly and cheaply than building coal plants or building renewable energy plants.
That's what we recommend in detail.
But the interesting conclusion of our new report is that we model three different economic and energy growth scenarios.
And even in the high growth scenario, if China follows these recommendations, we believe that it can cap its coal consumption beginning in 2020.
That's next year. Why 2020?
Because number one, there is so much wastage in the system, both overcapacity in coal plants and inefficiencies in its industrial sectors,
and too, because there's a much cheaper, cleaner and faster alternative that is growing like wildfire in China.
And that is renewable energy. China has many reasons to promote wind and solar plants.
Air pollution is one. Climate change is another. Energy security is the third.
Climate change is fourth. China is one of the countries that is actually most susceptible to the impacts and risks of climate change,
and there was a good study done in collaboration with the UK that recently came out detailing exactly what types of climate risks China faces.
But China also recognises that clean energy is the largest market opportunity of the 21st century, and they recognise that it is a clean job creator.
China leads the world in clean energy jobs nearly 40 percent of the total.
That's over four million.
Clean energy jobs in 2018, how did try to get there to lead the world in solar and wind capacity, many other forms of renewable energy?
Massive investments for one. If you look here, you'll see that in 2017,
China's investments in renewable energy were greater than the next three countries put together the US, the EU and Japan.
And last year, it invested another hundred billion in renewable energy.
In comparison, say, to the US, which was sixty four billion.
Right, so right now, China has one out of every three.
More than one out of every three wind turbine in the world.
And you know, when I when I think about the arguments we're having in the United States about immigration and building a wall with Mexico,
I'm reminded of an old Chinese proverb which I may have made up where when the winds of touch,
when the winds of change blow, some people build walls, others build windmills.
But really, the most exciting story here is solar power.
Ten years ago, China was already the leading exporter of solar panels.
But if you put together all of the solar capacity it had on the ground.
It's it's less than one small city in the US the city of San Antonio has today.
Yet in 10 years, China is now by far the juggernaut of solar power.
Why? Because in the 2008 recession, countries like Germany, which had very good subsidies for solar power with China, was selling them solar panels.
They cut their subsidies, so the market dropped out of the Chinese solar power industry,
and they recognised that they needed to develop a domestic capacity.
And so they did so again with heavy, heavy subsidies, about 60 billion dollars for solar panel, as well as investments in R&D.
They named solar panel as a strategic industry in 2012.
They invested in R&D, and they set targets for innovation, for expanding their markets overseas and for bringing down the cost.
So in the five years alone, from 2008 to 2013, the year of the Apocalypse?
Excuse me. In just five years, China had dropped the cost of solar power globally by 80 percent.
And. Let in 2017, China installed as much solar power as the entire world had on the ground just two
years before and last year also they installed more solar power alone than coal,
nuclear and gas combined.
The amount of power that they generated in 2018 from wind and solar was equal to the total power generation of the UK and the Netherlands,
and by next year, China will have as much solar capacity on the ground.
Two equals four times that of the United States. But China built its solar power mainly through subsidies,
and the number of plants that were built was so high that they ran out of money to in their renewable energy fund to pay for those subsidies.
The shortfall is now about 20 billion dollars.
But at the same time, because the cost of solar is dropping so much, China is embarked on an enormous transformation here,
from supporting solar to having it stand on its own economically and compete head to head with solar plants.
They have slashed the subsidies from last year.
They're requiring different solar plants to compete with each other to see who can offer the cheapest price to the grid.
And they have their first. They announced their first batch of totally unsubsidised solar and wind power earlier this year.
Everybody thought that was the death of solar power in China, where they couldn't survive without subsidies.
But what happened instead? Because once the subsidies were taken away, the price dropped even more.
And in this last year, the price of solar has dropped another thirty five percent.
China is also setting up other market mechanisms like quotas.
Well, this is a combination of regulation and market mechanism,
but they are in the process of setting a renewable energy quota for every province and major power user and those provinces.
If they don't generate enough themselves, they have to buy renewable energy certificates from other provinces.
This will go a long way towards addressing some of the curtailment problems that China has had for so solar and wind energy,
and the fact that the renewable energy is is really at its highest rate in the western part of the country, far from the populated eastern centres.
So here we go. This just is. The new Global Renewable Energy Report came out this morning, as I put it in here,
despite what people thought about China's market bottoming bottoming out.
It did decline, but it's still greater than four times the new solar additions as the next highest mark as the United States and.
This is the global energy transition now. 11 of Chinese in 11 of Chinese provinces already, it's as solar power is as cheap as coal.
And more provinces are following hard behind.
This is the global energy transition.
The fact remains, however, that despite this rapid growth, our world energy system is still two thirds fossil fuels.
But because of what China has done to bring those costs down and really tackle a lot
of the questions of curtailment and integrating renewable energy into the grid.
Experts say that when bringing down the costs of energy storage,
experts say that we are now on a path where we the world could reach 50 percent renewables by 2050.
And sure enough, in the world, so this is again from this brand new report, China,
excuse me, the world added more renewables last year than fossil fuel and nuclear.
So we are in a paradigm shift. And I think this is the perfect picture to illustrate what I'm talking about China.
A year or two ago turned on the world's largest floating solar power plant on top of a collapsed coal mine.
But it's not enough. It's by far not enough for us to deal with our climate emergency here.
According to the latest report by the International Panel for Climate Change, the U.N. scientists say we have to as a society,
as a world, reach 60 to 85 percent renewable energy by 2050, so every country needs to ramp up.
Their efforts in China itself still faces enormous geographical, technical and most of all, political challenges to really ramping up solar and wind.
And so do other countries. So there's a tremendous opportunity for collaboration here because to my mind,
the real issue is not competition between the U.S. and China, say or any other country on energy.
It's a competition between solar and fossil fuels so quickly on electric vehicles.
This is another area where starting that year of the apocalypse.
China launched in earnest what journalist Tom Friedman called a moonshot a
multibillion dollar moonshot to lead the world in electric vehicle production again.
Why is that energy? Security China is now the world's largest oil importer.
Environmental protection, climate change, but once again,
market opportunity and people often think that China is one monolithic government making decisions in every province implements them.
But I have seen over by 30 years in China that the impact of an individual can make an enormous difference.
And I would argue that this fellow here who was became the Minister of Science and
Technology after becoming after starting off as an automotive engineer here in Germany.
Working for Audi is the one with the vision who pushed through China's moonshot on electric vehicles.
Again, it's a combination of subsidies $10000 US average per electric vehicle, nonfinancial perks such as parking places,
special lanes, not having to enter a lottery, to get a licence plate and so on.
China also has come up with tougher standards for diesel and combustion engine cars, and they did something else.
That, to me, is brilliant. Last September, they announced that if any of the world's largest automakers wished to sell vehicles in China,
the world's largest auto market, they had to ensure that a certain percentage percentage of them were these new energy vehicles.
And I never saw such a quick response from the automakers who have been dragging
their feet for years because they make more money from this larger SUV.
Now, every one of them has announced joint ventures in China.
New investments totalling something like three hundred billion dollars estimated over the last five years and new lines of electric vehicles.
China's also dropped the price. They are also the world's largest manufacturer of electric vehicle batteries.
About 50 percent of the ones in the world last year were sold by China.
So the problem is here once again,
is that China recognises that this electric vehicle prices are coming down so low they don't need to keep subsidising them so heavily.
And the subsidies have had some unintended impacts of stifling innovation and so forth.
So they are moving ahead to slash the. Subsidies for electric vehicles as well, and they hope to phase them all out by 2020.
So can can the electric vehicle industry survive?
Well, you've got things like the electric taxis and the ridesharing companies like China's Uber Didi Chuxing,
who's investing hundreds of millions of dollars on their own electric vehicles and transforming entire fleets.
You've also got electric buses in China. This is an amazing story.
China is now responsible for 99 percent of the world's electric buses,
and they've done it not by what some countries and cities do of replacing buses with electric once they reach the end of their useful life.
They are transforming entire fleets in cities to electric buses, and they have announced a new proposal last year,
excuse me, a new policy last month requiring every city to come up with a phaseout programme for electric buses.
So China is now responsible by far the world's largest market for electric vehicles and,
like I said, ninety nine percent of the world's electric buses.
But still, it's just like the solar and wind.
It's still such a tiny percentage of the fleet as we have it right now.
But because of what China has done again,
the experts are now they keep changing their estimates of when electric vehicles will become as cheap as combustion engine vehicles.
When I started this book, it was 10 years now, five four.
Now they're talking about it in a couple of years in certain markets. It'll be as cheap to buy an electric vehicle as a regular gas guzzler.
And for that reason, experts say we could get to 50 percent of the global car fleet electric by 2050.
But once again, the IPCC says No, not enough. Not enough.
Sixty five percent of all transport needs to be.
Electric by 2050, it's a very, very big, big ask, but we're working on it finally really quickly green finance.
China is a leader in green finance, and again, I would put it to one fellow named John,
who's head of China's Green Finance Committee and is leading the world in the development of a green finance system for China.
And the UK again has a lot of expertise in green finance and has been working very closely with China
on things like developing a green bond system and making sure that it works and can be verified.
But what we heard from Sam earlier is China is not at the point yet where it is applying those green finance principles to its investments overseas,
particularly in this Belt and Road Initiative, which is covering right now almost 70 countries.
China is financing or wants to finance infrastructure, roads, ports, power plants.
And together, these countries in the region that have signed up for this Belt and Road
Initiative are responsible for 60 percent right now of the world's CO2 emissions.
And China's much U.N. recognises that if China doesn't work to green its Belt and Road Initiative,
these countries emissions will be three times those of China in just a few years.
So China has done a lot to set up guidelines principles.
Committees to Green the Belt and Road,
and you can see that it's investment in renewable energy in these Belt and Road countries has grown quite a bit.
And it should be because solar and wind are now cheaper than coal plants,
because China has all the expertise to help these recipient countries transition to low carbon just like it's doing.
But unfortunately, this is dwarfed by the amount of money that China, Japan and Korea are financing if coal plants in Belt and Road countries.
Some estimates are that 50 percent of the new coal plants being built around the world are being financed by China in these Belt and Road countries.
And it's not by private companies because the market is leaning everybody towards renewables.
These are being financed by Chinese state owned banks. So there's a lot that needs to be done to green the BRT.
There was a huge second annual forum in May. 40 different countries participated.
They set up green 10 working groups for greening the Belt and Road.
My organisation is part of one of setting up environmental standards and targets that are going to be hopefully mandatory.
But what can China do to really put its money where its mouth is and green the Belt and Road?
And one very important thing, especially as we our goal with the U.N. is asking every country to increase its ambition.
Its Paris pledges its NDC if China can use those countries indices as a guideline for its Belt and Road investments.
There are billions of dollars available in financing.
World Resources Institute estimated that there is two hundred and thirty billion dollars worth of renewable energy
investment opportunities in the three countries that have indicated renewable energy goals in their Paris commitments.
China's May Solar, a strategic industry in China.
It can do the same in other countries. But the bright countries have a lot that they can do as well.
In particular, update their NDC so that they have quantitative teeth to them and can serve as a guideline
for investments from China and work with China and others to strengthen their policies,
their grids and deal with the incumbent advantages that they to give to coal power.
Strengthen their green financing policies. So in conclusion, you may ask, so will China save the planet?
And I'm tempted to say we'll just buy my book and you'll find out.
But really, it's so clear to me that not one country can do it all.
Every the new UN Emissions Gap report said that every country needs to do more to increase their efforts to mitigate the impacts of climate change.
But what China can do is is something that the Tufts University just released
another report showing that China can peak its CO2 emissions much earlier.
And some of the top recommendations they have were very similar to what what
we had in our NRDC report that came out at the same time power sector reform.
Level the playing field for solar and wind so that they can become the world's largest energy source,
as many are predicting and energy efficiency get the waste out of the system.
It saves money, it makes you more competitive and it's cleaner.
So what gives me hope this is my office in Beijing.
We have got about 50 people right now working with China on every almost every aspect of its low carbon transition.
And I feel like we have worked with Oxford.
I was just telling you that we had a programme recently,
a couple of years ago where our environmental law team worked with the counterparts here at Oxford
to come up with a series of recommendations for China on strengthening its environmental law.
And I feel like there's a lot more that we can do to work together to help save the planet.
So thank you all so much, and I look forward to our discussion and your questions.
Thank you, Barbara. It's really lovely to have you here, not just as a fellow researcher and policy colleague, but as a friend from NRDC.
It's an organisation that we've both had the pleasure of working with.
You continue to be there. So there's, you know, there's something very striking about the story that you tell about China,
about how this is a country that started and grew to become one of the largest emitters and then move
to become a country that really started to take climate change mitigation and adaptation seriously,
particularly through renewables. And and this is remarkable, of course, in many ways.
It also leaves open some unanswered questions about other countries that are at a similar brink of expansion and of growth.
And you know, I'm particularly interested in the case of India because there's there's this sort of
narrative around how India and China together will determine the fate of the planet.
And I think that that clubbing can be a little bit problematic for a variety of number of ways.
But, you know, just to sort of try to talk through that a little bit.
Now these are both countries that that share some similar duality.
Right. So India is amongst the world's largest greenhouse gas emitters, and it has one of the largest economies.
But on the flip side, in terms of its multidimensional poverty index, which is an index that counts not just for GDP,
but also for other indicators of, you know, sort of well-being or sort of health education.
India ranks very low, much lower than than China does, and it ranks with countries that it's not clubbed with in the negotiations.
And then similarly, in terms of the number of people that it has that do not have access to clean cooking fuels or to electricity,
we're talking about hundreds of millions of people sizes of, you know, large European countries sometimes.
And then in terms of its greenhouse gas emissions, the low capita number for India is very low compared to China.
And the model predictions tell us that actually, even in 2030,
when we know that both India and China are going to keep growing in terms of their emissions and their economies,
even in 2030, India's per capita emissions are going to be lower than the global per capita emissions in 2014.
Right. So this is, I mean, just I'm going to say that again.
So the 2030 per capita emissions are going to be lower than the 2014 world average per capita emissions.
And the the emissions,
the sort of cumulative emissions are the aggregate emissions of India in 2030 are still going to be less than half of China's emissions in 2015.
Right. So it is clubbing. I mean, I want to sort of disassociate the clubbing.
But but I want to come back to China and the model of development that did that, it sort of undertook,
which is that, you know, it basically in that decade or more created this huge middle class.
Hundreds and millions of people were taken out of poverty. And that is not trivial.
That's not trivial for any country. There's a sort of certain quality of life and basic services that were given to many, many people.
And as you quote in your book and there are two things that you say that, you know, really the sort of stayed in my head.
One was that more coal was consumed in China in 2011 within the 600 kilometre radius of the capital than the entire United States.
Right. So, so just like that, part of China consumed more coal than the entire United States,
and we know what lifestyles and consumption in the United States is.
And the second was that in that decade, or a little more than the decade between 2000 and 2013,
China burned more coal to enable its economic boom than the rest of the world.
So, you know, this is and it's it's sort of there is this this level of wealth development,
quality of life, whatever we want to call it, that rode on the back of fossil fuels.
And it led to this environmental damage, particularly around air that really spiked the concern around how the country should move forward.
But the sort of provocative question I have for you is that, you know, given that other countries like India and, you know,
large parts of Africa will will soon be at that at that place, given that these countries are at least 15 to 20 years behind China.
Why should they be not in their own? In their own national interest, not follow the same path and say, we're going to develop first,
bring hundreds and millions of people out of poverty and we'll clean up afterwards.
And and you know what, what response do you have to that, particularly in a context?
I mean, most see for India the, you know, most of the worst popular polluted cities in the world are now in India.
But it doesn't drive the same political momentum. There isn't the same kind of public outcry that could change policies because there is a real
question of of needing to develop and that tension between environment and development,
which is sort of at the heart of our negotiations and our climate conversations,
it's very hard for that to come out in favour of the environment when we are really struggling with questions of development.
So how would you respond to that publication that it shouldn't shouldn't?
Emerging economies develop first and clean up after I ran into this problem when I started working in China,
actually, NRDC was always promoters of energy efficiency,
and I would go to China and make that argument that California was able to keep its per
capita energy use flat for since the 1970s oil crisis while continuing to grow its economy.
California is maybe the fifth largest economy in the world right now.
Nobody wanted to hear it in China because they were in the process of electrification.
As you say, so many people didn't have power at all, and they were concerned, like you say, bringing people out of poverty.
And it was about eight years in the wilderness before the outages I mentioned due to the skyrocketing economic growth
really started to get so bad that the only way out was either just shut down all the factories or come back to NRDC,
see and say, What were you saying about energy efficiency? And that's how we got started.
But there's one big difference, and that's what I talk about here.
That's why the only reason I would even have this title of will try to save the planet.
It's not because of what China's doing on coal, it's because of renewable energy.
And what we're learning now is these coal plants that China is financing overseas or that India is building actually India.
They have found it's already solar is cheaper than building new coal plants.
Sometimes building new solar and wind is cheaper than buying the coal for the existing coal plants.
Even solar and wind, including energy storage to take, you know, note of the fact that it's variable source of energy is cheaper than the coal plants.
So what what people are finding? The analysts are finding that it's these are stranded assets.
These plants, the only 40 percent of the coal plants in China, some say 50 or uneconomic.
They are not going to ever, ever return a profit.
And all these coal plants that China is financing overseas, it's going to be stranded assets.
So these countries and India too do not have to follow the same path.
There is a new path that China has helped to to blaze, and that is.
Clean energy, that's the clean energy revolution that we're talking about, countries can take advantage of that,
but again, it's not easy because the rules of the road are are still stacked in favour of coal.
But it can be done. I'm conscious of time, so I have more questions,
but I think we should open it up and then it can come back, I can ask you some more at the end of room.
So, yes, we don't need and stranded assets. I think the answer's been been given, but let's have some questions and we start from the back.
This lady and I should say before you speak and say, this is broadcast live.
So if you don't want to be seen, don't say anything, okay? If you could say who you are, where you're from, that would be great.
My name is in the running and I run a construction company and it is eco sustainable green homes and I am very happy with China.
It's been last eight years that we have all our measly.
Most of the material is coming from China. And I've been there for the last three years every year and I think there will be a leader very soon.
That's all I can say that the whole world's leader, because when we get there and be with panels from them and they are always helping us and
they are also helping if anybody else is interested and the rates are absolutely phenomenal.
Thank you very much. And I think a short statement, I appreciate this gentleman. I would take two or three questions together.
So my name is Judy Madison, and I'm a second year law student at Saint Peter's College,
which is right next to the union is quite small, so not everyone's always seen it.
And my question was related to the grass that you showed early on and the idea that when China started to slow down in terms of economic growth,
they reverted to old tactics and started using coal again.
I was wondering if you think that as a result of that, the future of the environment depends directly on China's economic stability.
One more of the back. This gentleman, just to add to John Hofmeister, I'm involved in one of the cheapening programmes at Oxford.
I actually have a similar question, but I want to tie it into Trump's trade policies.
I do a fair amount of work in China, and I'm noticing a new fear.
Similar to one, President Xi first started the anti-corruption campaigns.
Now the fear is around this economic instability potential.
I just want you to comment on whether you see that also. I think that those are both very important questions, because as I said before,
and as you pointed out this China's concerns about its continued economic growth are really driving this,
this growth in coal consumption and CO2 emissions. But I would just I would not say that because of that,
China's economic future is going to determine the future of our planet because it doesn't have to be, as I said before,
with what the examples of California, for example,
I have to show that you can continue to protect the environment in the climate whilst continuing to grow your economy.
That's really the main mission of my organisation in China is to show best practises, market mechanisms.
Incentives, and so if that can help China to continue and reach that economic stability without, I mean, just let me give you one example.
China launched a green bond programme in 2016, and within two years it's now the second largest in the world after the United States and.
It offers lower interest rates for green bonds, and last year again, it was,
I think, one hundred and twenty green bonds worth $31 billion were issued in China.
But a few weeks ago, China announced a new bond programme for local governments to help shore up the economy.
And they're not green bonds. They're just regular bonds. Well,
that one simple change China could harness the power of the private sector through
green finance in a way that's going to reach help it reach all of its goals.
Hi, I'm a DPhil student here studying in China, in the environment.
And given that the IPCC, the Paris Climate Change Acts,
have been criticised as techno utopianism from people such as Kevin Anderson at Manchester University.
Have you not just presented a techno utopianism of China when actually the second half of the problem of climate change is political and social?
And how is China able to quickly adapt itself to the political and social realities of a transition for a stable future?
Well, China is dealing with political and economic realities here.
That's why it is using these infrastructure investments in heavy industry and dirty industry as a way to shore up its economy,
not because those are the best.
In fact, many experts say it's the issue of diminishing returns what worked before when China was still growing at a rapid rate?
It's no longer effective. But why is China using these methods?
It's because the fossil fuel industry is very powerful.
Coal is a very powerful incumbent. Why is China financing coal plants overseas?
They don't make economic sense. It's because the state owned fossil fuel companies are pushing it.
This is the political reality. But the fact of the matter is that the air pollution is going up again.
So when you have public concern rising,
that's when China takes action and when people see there's ways to make money and to transition to close clean energy jobs,
that's when you're going to really see a change. We've already seen, I mean, the fact of the matter is, as I've said,
the coal consumption and the CO2 emissions are still not where they were before the air apocalypse.
Because China is serious, it has a lot of its own reasons.
It's it's only going to act in its own best interest, whether it be climate, environment or economy.
And it's only a question of how China defines its own self-interest.
Thank you. Nice try. My name is Nicholas, president of a member of the International Society for the Study of Time.
A question often raised meetings. Here is how you deal with climate variability and the variability of day and night in these systems.
And the answer usually is enormous coverage of land with batteries and other identifiable assets.
How is China coping and how, broadly speaking, do you see the answer to this question?
Thank you. Let's take this up here and then this is take two more then.
Make it short, please. I study law in Chicago.
I wonder if you think that China's grasp on the renewable market is in the bag or do you think if a Democrat becomes president 2020,
the U.S. can rival in that sector? One more question for you.
Hold on. Oh, hi there.
I'm Rebecca. I am a second year candidate in the School of Geography and Environment for a PhD.
I lived and worked in China for a year with the Nature Conservancy, and we were dealing a lot with the issue of hydropower.
And my question is, what's your opinion or stance on the role of hydropower within the renewable energy future,
both within China and Ashley and its investments internationally?
Thank you. OK, three issues, OK? Three issues.
So in terms of the variability of renewable energy, China is capturing the field on energy storage and batteries, and it has some of the largest.
You know, we've heard in the news about Tesla was building a Gigafactory four for electric vehicle batteries.
Well, China's building giga cities. I would term them entire cities just devoted to building electric batteries.
And the good news there, once again, is that China's brought.
Because of this, China's brought down the cost of batteries of electric batteries again by nearly three quarters in just five years.
We cannot keep up with that. That's why electric vehicles will soon be cost competitive.
That's why solar and wind will be able to be integrated on the grid as variable energy sources.
But that's not the only option. China's invested in pumped hydro, which I will talk about in a minute.
China's looking at options, and this is in our report for building more flexibility into the grid so that the the grid operators can react
more quickly to the availability of solar and wind and aren't stuck with just continuing to accept coal power,
no matter how dirty or expensive it is becoming.
So I'm a similar point your question about the U.S. and China on renewable energy.
The race is nowhere near over. And again, I want to point out to my mind, it's not a U.S. China race.
It's a race between solar and coal. But what the US, who invented the solar cell has still is the lead in innovation.
And unfortunately, we've been squandering that.
Our president has been trying every year in his proposed budget to slash the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy R&D.
And so that has really stifled our innovation.
But there has to be there's such enormous opportunity to develop the next type of renewable energy that's going to be even faster and cheaper.
And there's potential again,
for the whole new wonderful report by some Stanford researchers called the new Solar System that spells out exactly the benefits,
the comparative advantage of each country and how they can work together to benefit
themselves by together ramping up the global solar and wind markets and hydropower and,
yes, China. You know, when we hear these non-fossil targets, it sounds good.
It's not at all just solar and wind. China leads the world in hydropower by far, but there's, you know,
a lot of people don't consider it renewable because of these severe environmental problems that it causes.
And China is not just within China itself, but in the countries downstream.
And most of the major rivers of Asia find begin in China, and China has been very busy damming them up, leading to severe droughts downstream.
China is beginning. I'm seeing the glimmer of changes here for two reasons, I think.
One is that the impacts of climate change water scarcity in China is one of the major ones.
So the water table in these rivers is dropping and they are no longer you're seeing the amount of
power that is being generated by these dams is is dropping and will continue to drop so that again,
economic cost because solar and wind is getting so cheap.
All the other forms of energy are finding it difficult to find that power up ramp up.
And here's what I thought was very telling. Remember, I mentioned that China is talking about increasing its target for renewable energy by 2030.
This current one is non-fossil, but they're setting one just for solar and wind, not even for hydro and when they're developing.
They started this already last year, developing renewable energy quotas for every province.
They have to for every province one is including.
Hydro and the other is not including hydro, so they recognise a different programme.
One more question why didn't you ask a question that you were going to ask?
And then I got my four individual companies so long term investment on development, more efficient energy use would be costly and risky.
So. Right.
So in this case, I'm just thinking, should we just let the market just do its function or do we do think that what is the role of government in here?
That's the question. And Mike, do you want ask a question? So the one thing you haven't addressed at all is the issue of food and agriculture.
And I know it seems like in China there there are levels of of fertiliser application and therefore production and energy use is very high.
Plus, their levels of imports from across the globe is leading to a lot of CO2 release as well.
How are they factoring that into all of their calculations around greenhouse gases and around environmental sustainability?
Yeah, I in fact, there are many,
many issues other sources of of greenhouse gas emissions that just didn't have the scope in my book or am I talked to cover?
And that's a very important one. That was actually the subject I was telling Sam of Energy CS First Project in China almost 30 years ago,
we identified the fertiliser industry as a very important one.
So China has developed. I mean, it's part of the IPCC, but it really relies on its own scientists, and it has come up with it several times now.
But most recently, a 900 page climate change assessment report in I urge you to take a look because that's where they get into the brawl,
the broader issues that you're talking about, including food and agriculture.
Thank you. But again, it's not there. I can't pretend that it's their main focus right now.
I hope someone's going to have a difficult question. You. But the gentleman at the back and we can take maybe one or two more question.
Barbara, thanks so much for your talk today. Roger Ailes of Palo Alto, California.
I'm channelling my son, who was born in California, studied Earth systems at Stanford, and Siddharth was an NRDC fellow.
So the question here, it's a comment and a question or an asking a question.
First of all, could you compare and contrast California and China?
That false sense of what states are nation states leave the U.S. to the side, leave Trump to the side, please speak to California and China.
And then secondarily, is it really China who will save the Earth or is it California?
Ha ha ha ha ha ha. Yes, my colleagues in our San Francisco office are always making that point for me.
And in fact, what what one of the things we've done for 30 years is to bring experts from California to China to share their best practises.
But increasingly, it's going in the other direction as well.
I remember Arnold Schwarzenegger coming to China several times to beg for high speed rail.
China leads the world in high speed rail, and a year ago there's something called the Clean Energy Ministerial,
where energy ministers from every country who wishes to attend come together to discuss sharing energy policies and technologies,
and Beijing hosted it last year. So our current secretary of energy, Rick Perry, can.
But the Chinese minister wouldn't meet with him. Who did he meet with?
Jerry Brown and Jerry Brown has been to China many times and signed a series of environmental agreements, in fact,
that we we facilitated we meaning NRDC and another NGO that I founded in San Francisco
ten years ago called the China-U.S. Energy Efficiency Alliance because China,
California leads the world in efficiency. We facilitated the first province to California Clean Energy Agreement, and I'm very happy to say that.
Just the other day, Jerry Brown announced that he's setting up a California China institute to
help that exchange to continue because that's where the action is right now.
So before I think we're going have to stop that there's an opportunity to have a drink together next door in a cafe and talk more
to Barbara as an opportunity to buy a book in here or at the cafe in the cafe next door as quite a limited number of copies.
So they almost go first, come first before Radhika makes a closing comment.
As a closing comment or a forward looking, it's a forward looking question.
I want you just to think about the answer to the question that's written on the front of the book.
Will China save the planet? I think we've heard a pretty balanced assessment about it might or it might not work at national.
I think this really important point about the subnational actors has come out very strongly today, but it works regionally.
We heard about the Belt and Road and it works significantly in international level.
So while Radhika is putting her question and before you leave, you know, actually think about what you're going to do with your hand in a minute,
whether it's a yes or no to the question of whether China will save the planet radical,
why didn't you ask the question what people think it might help? My question might help in formulating that answer.
It's really about the negotiations that are coming up this year in Chile.
And, you know, given that the US has decided to exit the stage and the US-China bilateral was
really key in formulating the Paris Agreement and the text and the Paris Agreement.
Do you see China occupying that stage, which is currently vacant at the international negotiations?
Oh, that's the $64000 question.
I do say that in my experience, China does not want to act alone.
Their answer to this question is no.
So that's why things like UK's recent decision to adopt a zero carbon net zero carbon target for 2050 is so important.
That's why the EU cooperation with China on climate change is so important.
That's why the state to China cooperation is so important.
China will not act alone. Okay, so the question isn't can China save the planet?
Is the question is, will China save the planet? Those in favour?
Come on, hold hands up. OK.
Those who think it won't. Barbara, I didn't see what you did with your hands.
Fine, we have to come back and say that we had to buy the book. Yes, that's right.
All right, Barbara, thank you very, very much. It's been very engaging, very illuminating.
I think we all knew a bit about China. We all know a lot more now.
So please, David, thank you very much indeed.