Lauri Myllyvirta, Senior Fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute and Lead Analyst at the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA), spoke to CGTN Europe, discussing the recent decline in China’s CO₂ emissions from the power sector due to the growth of solar and wind energy and the electrification of transportation. He emphasized, however, that global carbon neutrality is still necessary to halt the rise in atmospheric CO₂ concentrations. China has committed to peaking its CO₂ emissions before 2030, and the next few years will be crucial. According to Myllyvirta, the clean energy boom has reached a scale where it can both meet China’s growing electricity demand and reduce fossil fuel consumption. This progress is significant, China’s emissions are stabilizing even as energy use continues to grow, but further advances are still needed in other parts of the world, such as India.
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.
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