
China is on track to beat its peak-emissions pledge - bryanrasmussen
https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/07/china-is-on-track-to-beat-its-peak-emissions-pledge/
======
ei8htyfi5e
I've lived there and can say from experience China just makes stuff up. The
local governments are responsible for reporting to higher ups and they don't
want to miss targets, so they straight up lie. In reality it's a house of
cards. You can lie about a 2% change once, and twice, and three times, but
soon your lies compound and it's clear you didn't reduce emissions by the rate
you reported. Only time will prove me correct about this. They do this with
air quality regularly. Chinese official numbers of PM2.5 are regularly 30-50%
lower than what the US embassy reports.

~~~
smacktoward
I don’t know why you’re getting downvoted on this, it’s a common problem in
authoritarian governments of all stripes. Nobody gets promoted from
Apparatchik to Senior Apparatchik by pushing back on the quotas set for them.

------
YippRino
I'd like to be proven wrong here but I tend to suspect them of fudging their
numbers, so to speak. There is a lot of corruption at the municipal level and
there is incentive for local officials to overstate their progress.

That said, pollution is pretty serious in their bigger cities so I hope for
everyone's sake the numbers are true.

~~~
simion314
Is it easy to fake the numbers this days where you can automate a lot of the
measurements?

~~~
saagarjha
Well, it depends on who's making the measurements. How easy is it to actually
measure China's emissions by a neutral third party?

~~~
TeMPOraL
With the proposed new set of EU's Sentinel satellites hopefully to be launched
in the coming years, it should be trivial. That is, if the proposed mission
actually happens.

------
rayiner
What a bizarrely upbeat article. China’s CO2 output will supposedly peak at 10
tons per person for $21,000 GDP per capita. Using the article’s numbers, The
US achieves triple the GDP per capita with just 60% higher CO2 emissions. Note
also that China’s population will peak and then start declining in just a few
years, which has a lot to do with why CO2 output will peak:
[https://www.google.com/amp/s/mobile.reuters.com/article/amp/...](https://www.google.com/amp/s/mobile.reuters.com/article/amp/idUSKCN1S8048).
The only reason US CO2 output didn’t peak decades ago is that the US
population continues to grow steadily.

~~~
yorwba
> The US achieves triple the GDP per capita with just 60% higher CO2
> emissions.

The paper is based on the environmental Kuznets curve model [1], according to
which growth in GDP per capita eventually allows more environmentally friendly
policies to be implemented, causing pollution per unit of GDP to shrink again.
That's exactly the effect that allows the US to generate a higher GDP with
comparatively smaller increases in CO2 emissions. The paper uses the fact that
some countries are farther along the curve than others to empirically fit the
parameters and uses that to estimate when CO2 emissions per capita will peak
given current economic development.

Note that that's just about the per-capita measures; the expected peak in
population compounds the effect.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuznets_curve#Environmental_Ku...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuznets_curve#Environmental_Kuznets_curve)

