Two different news regarding China hit the twitterverse on the same day last week. First, the bad one : The People’s Republic’s greenhouse gases emissions may have been underestimated by as much as 20 percent.
This huge difference – as much as the annual emissions of Japan, or 1.4 Gt of CO2 – can be explained by the fact that there are ” inconsistencies of coal consumption between national and provincial statistics “
All this has a lot of repercussions for everyone as it makes climate change mitigation even harder than it was for both scientists and internatinonal negotiation.
The good news : Chinese people expressed serious concerns regarding their environment and believe the protection is more important than the economy. As Climate Progress noted :
Gallup has just released new poll results showing that a majority of Chinese citizens care more about cleaning up the environment than they do about growing the economy.
Among Chinese adults Gallup surveyed last year, 57 percent believe that protecting the environment should be their country’s priority, even if improving environmental standards slows the pace of economic growth.
Only 21 percent believe that economic growth is more important than environmental protection.
Now let’s see what the local government will do about these news. There is a huge need and call for action from the Chinese people. This isn’t surprising with the worrying news I reported previously.
Let’s hope China will indeed introduce a carbon tax in 2015 or before…
