China Pledges Bigger Carbon Cuts - Further In The Future, Of Course

HONG KONG — China, the world’s biggest greenhouse gas polluter, pledged on Tuesday to wean its economy away from reliance on fossil fuels as it grows, and to try to bring the rise in its carbon emissions to an earlier end.

The Chinese government offered the goals as building blocks for a new international agreement on countering global warming, which governments hope to reach at a conference in Paris late this year.

How quickly and how much China’s emissions will grow is crucial to the arithmetic of global climate change, which is driven by rising levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, especially carbon dioxide. China’s motor vehicles, factories, power plants and boilers released 29 percent of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions in 2013 — twice the amount released by the United States, the world’s largest economy and second-largest carbon polluter.

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Public discontent at home about hazardous air pollution has magnified the pressure on China to cut its use of coal, the dominant source of both its smog and its carbon emissions. But China’s leaders have not yet detailed just how high the country’s emissions are likely to rise before they peak, or how rapidly they might decline afterward — important elements in forecasting global concentrations of greenhouse gases. Mr. Li’s new carbon intensity target does not directly answer those questions because it is a relative measure, yoked to the rate of economic growth, which can rise or fall.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/01/world/asia/china-carbon-emissions-climate-change.html?_r=0