25 April 2018
By Jeff Tollefson
...So it was in 2017, (click here) when, after staying relatively flat from 2014 to 2016, carbon emissions grew by about 1.5% (see ‘A brief lull’). All it took to create that spike was a small rise in economic growth across the developing world, according to a final estimate released in March by the Global Carbon Project, an international research consortium that monitors carbon emissions and climate trends....
...That small blip in China’s coal emissions might have been a major contributor to the spike, but developments in other countries also played a part (see ‘The big contributors’). India’s emissions rose faster than expected, owing to stronger economic growth. Thanks to changes in fossil-fuel consumption, emissions in the United States and European Union dropped more slowly in 2017 than in years past. Then there is the rest of the world, whose emissions rose by 2% in 2017, according to the Global Carbon Project’s analysis. That includes developing countries, where tapping fossil fuels remains a relatively cheap and easy way of making economic progress....
...Kejun’s calculations suggest that, driven both by policy and economics, China’s carbon emissions are still on track to peak as early as 2020, and its coal consumption could drop by as much as 40–50% by 2030. “The transition has already started,” says Kejun....
...Today, the solar-power industry is booming in India, thanks to government incentives and falling prices, and the Indian government aims to install 100 gigawatts of solar capacity by 2022 — nearly double the current solar-generation capacity in the United States. Meeting that goal could be challenging, because solar power will increasingly need to compete with existing coal-fired power plants for limited space on the electricity grid, says Rahul Tongia, an energy researcher at the non-profit public-policy organization the Brookings Institution in New Delhi. Still, he says, the trends are impressive. “Maybe it takes a bit longer to hit the targets. Who cares?” Tongia says. “The progress is still remarkable, measurable, dramatic and meaningful.”...
