On this thread, Sami Grover on Treehugger.com notes a report from Climate Action Tracker indicating China and India – the latter earlier had been reported planning to build many coal power plants – are pulling more than their share of the decarbonisation load:
China and India are actually years ahead of their climate commitments.
Those, at least, are the findings from Climate Action Tracker which suggest that scaling back of coal consumption in both countries is likely to be enough to ‘cancel out’ the expected slowing down of progress by the United States under President Trump. India, for example, had pledged to lower the emissions intensity by 33 to 35 percent by 2030 compared to 2005 levels. The new analysis suggests they will leap past that mark to a 42 to 45 percent cut in emissions intensity by 2030.
Bill Hare of Climate Analytics described the significance of these findings:
“Five years ago, the idea of either China or India stopping—or even slowing—coal use was considered an insurmountable hurdle, as coal-fired power plants were thought by many to be necessary to satisfy the energy demands of these countries. Recent observations show they are now on the way toward overcoming this challenge.”
While China may not be so surprising, given the nature of their political system, India is a raucous democracy, where in any group of N people you’ll find N+1 opinions (an observation from the book Being Indian, by Pavan Varma – very interesting, I must add), at least.
On the other hand, such predictions are only that – predictions. We’ll see how they pan out over the next few years. But it’s good to see things may be looking up.
