"China, the world’s leading emitter of greenhouse gases from coal, has been burning up to 17 percent more coal a year than the government previously disclosed, according to newly released data. The finding could complicate the already difficult efforts to limit global warming.
Even for a country of China’s
size, the scale of the correction is immense. The sharp upward revision
in official figures means that China has released much more carbon
dioxide — almost a billion more tons a year according to initial
calculations — than previously estimated.
The increase alone is greater than the whole German economy emits annually from fossil fuels. Officials from around the world will have to come to grips with the new figures when they gather in Paris
this month to negotiate an international framework for curtailing
greenhouse-gas pollution. The data also pose a challenge for scientists
who are trying to reduce China’s smog, which often bathes whole regions in acrid, unhealthy haze.
The
Chinese government has promised to halt the growth of its emissions of
carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse pollutant from coal and other fossil
fuels, by 2030. The new data suggest that the task of meeting that
deadline by reducing China’s dependence on coal will be more daunting
and urgent than expected, said Yang Fuqiang, a former energy official in China who now advises the Natural Resources Defense Council.
“This
will have a big impact, because China has been burning so much more
coal than we believed,” Mr. Yang said. “It turns out that it was an even
bigger emitter than we imagined. This helps to explain why China’s air
quality is so poor, and that will make it easier to get national leaders
to take this seriously.”
The
new data, which appeared recently in an energy statistics yearbook
published without fanfare by China’s statistical agency, show that coal
consumption has been underestimated since 2000, and particularly in
recent years. The revisions were based on a census of the economy in
2013 that exposed gaps in data collection, especially from small
companies and factories.
Illustrating
the scale of the revision, the new figures add about 600 million tons
to China’s coal consumption in 2012 — an amount equivalent to more than
70 percent of the total coal used annually by the United States.
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“It’s been a confusing situation for a long time,” said Ayaka Jones, a China analyst at the United States Energy Information Administration in Washington. She said the new data vindicated her earlier analysis of China’s preliminary statistics, which flagged significantly increased numbers for coal use and overall energy consumption.
The
new data indicated that much of the change came from heavy industry —
including plants that produce coal chemicals and cement, as well as
those using coking coal, which goes to make steel, Ms. Jones said. The
correction for coal use in electric power generation was much smaller.
Officials
accepted the need to correct worsening distortions in the old data but
have not commented publicly on the changes, according to Lin Boqiang,
director of the China Center for Energy Economics Research
at Xiamen University in eastern China. Mr. Lin said in a telephone
interview that this was partly because the new figures made it more
complicated to set and assess the country’s clean-energy goals.
“It’s
created a lot of bewilderment,” he said. “Our basic data will have to
be adjusted, and the international agencies will also have to adjust
their databases. This is troublesome because many forecasts and
commitments were based on the previous data.”
When President Xi Jinping
proposed that China’s emissions stop growing by 2030, he did not say
what level they would reach by then. The new numbers may mean that the
peak will be higher, but they also raise hopes that emissions will crest
many years sooner, Mr. Yang, the climate adviser, said.
“I
think this implies that we’re closer to a peak, because there’s also
been a falloff in coal consumption in the past couple of years,” he
said.
Chinese energy and statistics agency officials did not respond to faxed requests for comment on the data revisions. The
press office of the International Energy Agency said by email that the
organization would revise its own data to reflect China’s revisions,
starting with numbers for 2011 to 2013 that will be released Wednesday.
The agency estimated, based on the new figures, that China’s carbon
dioxide pollution in 2011 and 2012 was 4 percent to 6 percent greater
than previously thought.
But some scientists said the difference could be much larger. Jan Ivar Korsbakken,
a senior researcher at the Center for International Climate and
Environmental Research in Oslo, said that based on his preliminary
analysis, the new data implied that China had released about 900 million
metric tons more carbon dioxide from 2011 to 2013.
That would be an 11 percent increase in emissions, he said. For comparison, the International Energy Agency estimated
before the revision that China had emitted 8.25 billion tons of carbon
dioxide from fossil fuels in 2012. Dr. Korsbakken, a physicist,
emphasized that deeper analysis of the new data was needed before firm
conclusions could be drawn.
When
estimating emissions, scientists prefer to account for coal use by the
amount of energy in it rather than by its raw mass, which includes
impurities that end up as ash. Measured in energy terms, Dr. Korsbakken
said, China consumed 10 percent to 15 percent more coal than the old
data had showed from 2005 to 2013, the last year for which the new and
old figures can be compared. The revisions for 2001 through 2004 were
smaller.
Economists
have grown increasingly skeptical about the economic data China
publishes, and the revisions open a new episode in the debate over its
energy use and greenhouse-gas emissions.
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China’s
emissions — 4.2 billion metric tons in 2013, according to the new data —
now far exceed those of any other country, including the United States,
the second-largest emitter.
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This
is not the first time China has underestimated its coal consumption. In
the late 1990s, small coal mines were ordered to close, but many of
them simply stopped reporting their output to the government. For a
time, this created an erroneous impression that China had succeeded in generating economic growth without increasing emissions.
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More recently, some scientists concluded that China’s emissions were lower
than widely believed because the coal it was using was of lower quality
and burned less efficiently than researchers had generally assumed. But
Mr. Yang said that conclusion had been disputed.
The
revised numbers do not alter scientists’ estimates of the total amount
of carbon dioxide in the air. That is measured directly, not inferred
from fuel consumption statistics the way countries’ emissions are
usually estimated.
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So
if China’s emissions have been much greater than believed, researchers
will want to understand where the extra carbon dioxide output ended up —
for example, how it might have been absorbed in natural “sinks” like
forests or oceans, said Josep G. Canadell, executive director of the Global Carbon Project, which studies the sources and flows of greenhouse-gas pollution.
“If the emissions are partially wrong,” Mr. Canadell said, “we’ll be wrong in attributing carbon sources and sinks.”"
"A version of this article appears in print on November 4, 2015, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: China Is Burning Much More Coal Than It Claimed.
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