00:00Now, Laurie Müller-Werter is Senior Fellow at Asia Society Policy Institute and Lead Analyst at CREA, joining us now.
00:07Laurie, thanks so much for your time.
00:09I wonder if you could give us your take on the data, specifically what it says about China.
00:15Absolutely. So 2024, last year, was the first year that China's clean energy boom really came to fruition
00:23in terms of bringing down CO2 emissions in the power sector.
00:29So there was an increase early in the year, but since the second quarter of 2024, emissions have been flat or falling for the past one and a half years,
00:41which is, of course, great news.
00:44So it's about the massive growth of solar and wind in the power sector.
00:49It's about the electrification of transportation and also declining emissions from steel and cement production.
01:01So very important trends.
01:03But of course, as the official report highlights, atmospheric CO2 concentrations are still rising fast,
01:12and those will only stop rising once we reach carbon neutrality globally.
01:19So there's obviously a very long way to go.
01:21Yeah. And we're all waiting for that moment that there's a peak and a decline.
01:24For China, is it all downhill from here in a good way?
01:30China's committed to peaking CO2 emissions before 2030.
01:342030. So that leaves the question about the next few years.
01:39The country is just finalizing the five-year plan for the next five years,
01:44and that's going to be definitive in terms of what happens to emissions over the next few years.
01:53But if the clean energy boom continues at the rate that it's happened in the past few years,
02:00there's a good chance that emissions will start coming down from now,
02:03and we would have actually seen the peak in China's CO2 emissions.
02:08I mean, that's potentially incredibly hopeful news.
02:11And against the backdrop of China's rising electricity consumption through issues such as AI,
02:17is it even more remarkable given that?
02:19Absolutely. So this is the first time that China's emissions are stable or falling
02:26while electricity consumption and total energy consumption continues to grow rapidly.
02:32So that really shows that the clean energy industry has reached the scale
02:37where it can cover all of China's electricity demand growth
02:42and start to bring down the use of fossil fuels.
02:46If we compare it to the rest of the world,
02:48China 0.6% growth, the rest of the world 0.8%.
02:52We know China was the biggest emitter.
02:55But let's look at that difference and what the rest of the world isn't doing.
03:00What do you have to say about that particular aspect of the data?
03:05When you break the rest of the world down further,
03:09you have countries that are reducing emissions.
03:12There was significant progress, for example, in the European Union,
03:17a major reduction in emissions.
03:20And then there are countries where emissions are still rising rapidly,
03:24particularly India has seen rapid growth in 2024.
03:28The good news is that India is also scaling up its investments in wind and solar
03:36and should reach the same tipping point in the next few years
03:42that China has already reached,
03:44where the growth of clean energy can cover electricity demand growth.
03:50So we're seeing the similar progress in a lot of other key markets as well.
03:58Thank you so much for breaking down the data for us.
04:00That's Laurie Molliverta,
04:01Senior Fellow at Asia Society Policy Institute and Lead Analyst at CREA.
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