Increasing pollution is an ineluctable law of nature

Looking at the way the world’s carbon emissions have risen in recent decades, it’s tempting to believe that increasing pollution is an ineluctable law of nature.
That’s by no means a heretical view. Vaclav Smil, the Czech-Canadian energy analyst revered by
Bill Gates, has often pointed to the growth in pollution since the 1980s as evidence that a transition to cleaner forms of energy will inevitably come too slowly to save the world from disaster.
“During those decades of rising concerns about global warming the world has been running into fossil carbon, not moving away from it,” he wrote in one 2019 study. Climate scientist Ken Caldeira made a $2,000, 10-year bet with energy analyst Ted
Nordhaus in January that 2019 wouldn’t prove the peak of global carbon emissions.
On global aggregate numbers, it’s hard to gainsay that conclusion. Over the decade through 2018, emissions increased by 12%, or 4.5 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide. A decade or so of further pollution at that level will eliminate all possibility of avoiding catastrophic warming. Break out the numbers by country, however, and a very different picture emerges.
Some 89% of the additional greenhouse gases came from just two countries: China, which alone accounted for 69% of the increase, and India. Emissions from the EU, Japan and US fell, and by 2018 were lower than they were in the 1990s.
That’s why the climate and energy plans that will be presented in China’s 14th Five Year Plan this week represent the most important policies being made anywhere in determining the fate of the planet. If they live up to the promise of President Xi Jinping’s pledge to reduce the country’s emissions to net zero by 2060, we may have to start lifting our expectations of what’s possible in terms of decarbonisation.
The unprecedented scale and carbon-intensity of China’s boom has served to obscure much of the progress made elsewhere in the world over the past decade. To name just two products, the country now makes more than half of the world’s steel and (in a parallel first pointed out by Smil) consumes about as much cement every two years as the US did during the 20th century.
The days when China could argue that those numbers were huge only because its population was large, or that they were necessary to catch up with richer countries, are now in
the past.
Even if you adjust for the effects of trade by using consumption-based emissions — so that, for example, a laptop made in Chongqing and sold in Toronto counts towards Canada’s carbon budget, not China’s — its per-capita emissions these days
are on a par with most western
European countries. In terms of
infrastructure, too, the construction boom of the past decade has left China with a public capital stock that’s larger on a per-capita basis than Germany, South Korea or
the UK.

—Bloomberg