Name: Why It’s Hard For China to Cut Carbon Emissions
Uploaded: 2016-05-17
Duration: 3 min 37 s
Description: Energy expert Kate Gordon explains.

Keith, you know that with China's approach, its more thought down, per saying Slightly It's also true that that its not without issues or challenges, or some contradictions in the way that they're thinking about Doing that. What do you see as some of the big challenges ahead then? Well, there are many as you said. You know, China does these five year planes. They are very, very much from the top down. They are very centralized. Technically that should mean that that all works out easily. Because everyone who's in- all the mayors and governors are also members of the party. So, A party statement should trickle down but operationally its very complicated. So for instance on renewable targets, there is a law in China that the utilities that grid operators must buy all renewable energy coming into the grid. However, they have already made put together contracts with the corporate resource to buy certain amount of coal every year. So by definition what happens, or in reality what happens is that coal gets first on the grit, in the dispatch order. And Dickens said earlier, and it's true, there's 15 % average curtailment of wind [ UNKNOWN ] in China right now, up to 30 % in some part of the country. That's a dispatch order issue. It's a transmission issue. There are different quotas for different regions that are met at different times. It is not an easy system to implement. And there's a lot that needs to happen there. There's a couple of other big challenges I point to. One is sort of an infrastructure challenge. So the head of the People's Bank of China, Ma Jun, recently said that the government would only be able to pay for about 10 to 15 % of the costs of the big energy transition that has to happen to meet the goals that China has put out in the Paris Agreements and beyond. Who pays for the rest of the infrastructure? I think this is a big question in general when we look at developing economies. Developed economies went through a big infrastructure development at a time when government put a lot more money into those things. Whether it was for national security with the highway system, whether it was mostly for national security with other systems, we don't Operate on those models exactly anymore. So how do you get the private capital in, particularly for the infrastructures that sort of everybody uses and no one wants to pay for, right? And then finally just something that I've been about a lot. I've been thinking a lot about the steel industry in China. Because as you've probably seen, any many of you know well There's an over capacity issue right now, so China is closing down a massive amount of steel and coal right now. They're looking at 2 million jobs in coal and steel going away pretty immediately. And 1. 3 million in coal and the other in steel. And closing down all kinds of plants. And the question, and China is of course trying to move towards a more service driven economy. Right now 70 % of China's carbon emissions Come, from energy, come from the industrial sector. So, they're trying to move toward a more [ UNKNOWN ] economy that should be more sustainable. India is trying to move toward more manufacturing. The question on the table sort of for all of us thinking about the Paris agreements, the whole world is in this together, is where does all that go? Everything everyone has talked about today, whether it's wind turbines, or solar systems, or other innovations. Most of those things have aluminum steel cement in them. Who makes those things in a world that's decided to be carbon constrained? And how do we avoid kind of the race to the bottom? Continuing on and on and on and then sort of waking up one day and saying we still have We still have all these emissions, what do we do with them? We have to think today about making that more efficient. Think today about the industrial sector. Think much more proactively than China certainly is doing. [ BLANK_AUDIO ]