Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
China's 12th Five Year Plan 2011-15 embodies far-reaching measures to
constrain emissions within the intensity targets that the Chinese government
has communicated to the international community (NDRC, 2012). In 2011, the
first year of the new Plan, emissions continued to grow strongly. This was deeply
discouraging for the international mitigation effort. However, policies to give
effect to the new Plan began to bite in 2012 and, together with economically
driven structural change, changed the emissions trajectory in 2012 to an extent
that over-performance against the pledge now seems possible (Garnaut, 2013).
Influential Chinese policies include a range of regulatory and fiscal measures
to promote energy efficiency (Xinhua, 2013); direct regulatory action to close
plants with emissions intensity above some threshold defined to be acceptable
(Mai and Feng, 2013); subsidies to research, development and application of
renewable energy production and other low-emissions activities; and public
funding for transformation of the electricity grid to reduce transmission losses
and to facilitate integration of intermittent supplies of renewable energy into the
national market (NDRC, 2012).
Emissions reductions in China are coming from many sources. In the electricity
sector, for example, the replacement of small and high emissions coal-based
generators by ultra-supercritical plants reduced emissions per unit of electricity
by 2.5 per cent per annum from 2007 to 2011, and is expected to continue to
reduce them by an average of 1.7 per cent for each of the next several years
simply by closure of environmentally inefficient plants that have been identified
(Mai and Feng, 2013). It is estimated that thermal power production increased
only by 0.6 per cent in 2012 after many years of increasing at near-double digit
rates. Within this low thermal power number, the proportion of gas rose rapidly
from a low base. All substantial low-emissions sources of power increased rapidly:
hydroelectric power by 20 per cent; nuclear by 17 per cent; and wind by 36 per
cent (Garnaut, 2013). It now seems possible that Chinese coal consumption
may reach a peak within the current Five-Year Plan 2011-15 - an outcome that
would represent a radical change from earlier experience and expectations and
contribute to building foundations for strengthening of global mitigation efforts
(Garnaut, 2013).
Conclusion
Australians in future will have to manage the world as they find it. We are likely
to be leaving them with a difficult task. We should seek to avoid leaving them
with an impossible one. A realistic examination of the limits of adaptation drives
us back to taking every chance to contain global warming within low limits, and
if possible within the agreed international objective of limiting global warming
to 2°C.
To take the chance that has been created by the emergence of a viable inter-
national regime built on concerted unilateral mitigation, and by the success so
far of substantial countries in meeting pledges within that regime, we promptly
need to do three things.
