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Coal Power Plant in Ningxia Hui, Northern China.
Photo: STRINGER SHANGHAI / REUTERS
When the Chinese Prime Minister Li Keqiang opened the annual People's Congress in Beijing on Friday, observers said a thick cloud of smog lay over the city.
Li Keqiang then presented the Republic's 14th Five-Year Plan to the 3000 MPs.
Most important point: Despite the global recession, China wants to achieve economic growth of more than six percent this year.
The Middle Kingdom is aiming high in the next few years as well: The Chinese leadership is relying on unrestrained growth in order to boost domestic demand in addition to the horrific spending on the military budget and, according to Li Keqiang, "generate new demand."
But China's growth comes at a high price: the country is the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases and is responsible for around a quarter of global emissions.
Whether the Chinese government will soon develop a carbon-friendly economy could help determine the future of the global climate.
Despite the massive expansion of wind and solar systems, it does not look like a green turnaround for the time being: Before the pandemic, the country reached a historic high with emissions of ten billion tons of CO₂.
The International Energy Agency (IEA), however, assumes that this value was exceeded last year despite the corona pandemic.
For comparison: The European Union blows around a third of Chinese emissions into the atmosphere.
However, if you count the CO2 emissions per capita, Germany, for example, is ahead of China with around nine tons.
Every Chinese person uses "only" seven tons per person per year - and the trend is rising.
China's dirty growth
China's climate protection problem is its unchecked fossil growth through the combustion of coal, oil and gas.
That hardly changes in the new five-year plan: the decoupling of CO2 consumption from gross domestic product (GDP) is planned, but not sufficient.
Per unit of GDP, CO2 emissions are expected to fall by 18 percent between 2020 and 2025.
This goal already existed in the previous plan, but could not prevent the massive increase in CO2 in recent years.
Even in the new plan, there is no obligation to limit CO2 emissions in the foreseeable future or to set an upper limit.
Renewable energies should reach 20 percent of the energy mix in the next few years - but that means that the remaining 80 percent is still fossil.
According to experts, the plan would advertise wind, sun and biogas as well as coal, oil and gas as a guarantee of growth.
What is new, however, is the focus on so-called “clean” coal or CO2-free oil and gas.
To this end, China is researching technologies that separate exhaust gases after the combustion process and are later stored underground.
In Europe, too, pilot projects for this CCS technology (Carbon Capture and Storage) are currently being developed.
Currently, however, CCS is still in the development stage and will not be ready for the market on a large scale before ten years at the earliest.
Most observers therefore anticipate that China's climate-damaging emissions will continue to rise sharply: With an annual growth of only five percent, emissions could increase by ten percent by 2025, estimate the British market analysts at Refinitiv Carbon.
"The five-year plan is a disappointing result for the international climate community," said climate expert Swithin Lui, from Climate Action Tracker and the Berlin-based New Climate Institute, to SPIEGEL.
"There is no progress on the carbon intensity of growth compared to the previous plan," says Swithin Lui.
The massive extraction of coal, oil and gas is not compatible with the world climate agreement and confirms China's intention to continue to grow strongly until 2030.
China does not want to emit a ton of CO₂ in 40 years
The unambitious plan is still surprising.
Because the Chinese leadership is by no means indifferent to climate policy.
As early as September, China's head of state and party leader Xi Jinping promised greater efforts in the fight against the climate crisis.
His country wants to achieve climate neutrality "before 2060".
Carbon dioxide emissions should also peak "before 2030".
But that's exactly the catch: In the Paris Climate Agreement, China declares that its emissions will continue to grow until 2030.
Experts have long hoped that the state will meet the target ahead of schedule (read more about this here).
For example, the EU is urging China to reduce its CO2 emissions as early as 2025.
Germany and the entire European Union have so far set the year 2050 as the target for CO₂ neutrality.
In most countries, emissions are expected to fall by 2030 - the only dispute is how much everyone contributes.
However, China is far from reducing its emissions.
The country can emit unlimited more CO₂ for the next decade.
"Nothing in the new five-year plan indicates that China will peak its emissions earlier than 2030," explains climate expert Swithin Lui.
In its current country report on China, Climate Action Tracker primarily criticizes the country's failure to turn away from coal.
The country continues to support the mining of coal and the construction of new power plants: In the first half of last year alone, the Chinese built more coal-fired power plants than in 2018 and 2019 combined.
China is the world's largest donor of hard coal and lignite - and that in times when more and more countries, including EU countries and the USA, are getting out of coal for economic reasons.
On the way to Glasgow
China has to submit its climate neutral roadmap to the UN climate secretariat this year.
In November, the signatories of the Paris Climate Agreement will meet in Glasgow for the first UN climate summit since 2019. The countries have to submit new climate targets every five years in order to close the gap to the 1.5 or two degree target.
After all, some countries, including the EU, Great Britain, Argentina, Chile, Norway, Kenya and Ukraine, have already improved their goals.
In addition to China, the second largest polluter is also missing: the USA.
The target increases to date are by no means sufficient: An analysis of the climate plans that have already been submitted shows that this would reduce global emissions by only one percent by 2030 compared to 2010.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has calculated that a reduction of 45 percent would be necessary for the 1.5-degree target, and that emissions would have to fall by 25 percent for the two-degree target.
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