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The People’s Republic of China is still the world’s biggest single source of environmental harm. China overfishes the world’s oceans, blasts mercury and nitrous oxide and other pollutants into the atmosphere, and dumps plastic waste into the sea. It has made progress on many of these problems, but when you’re the biggest global manufacturer, it’s very hard not to also be the biggest global polluter.
China’s most devastating environmental impact has been its emissions of greenhouse gases. Thanks to its unprecedented use of coal, China releases more carbon every year than the United States and Europe combined:
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And yes, this is true even after you account for offshoring of emissions. China is also the world’s leading emitter of other greenhouse gases — methane, nitrous oxide, F-gases, and so on. Historically, China has only accounted for 15% of total carbon emissions, but its share is rising quickly.
Unless China decarbonizes, there can be no victory over climate change, and the planet will roast. This is not a moral statement, but a simple fact.
There are two ways to decarbonize: 1) degrowth, and 2) green energy. None of the proponents of degrowth are asking China to stop growing its economy¹, and it wouldn’t matter if they did; China has no intention of slowing its growth in order to save the rest of the planet from climate change.
In fact, the same is true of the developing world. India, Southeast Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America aren’t going to impoverish themselves in order to save the climate. The only way for these countries to grow their economies without roasting the planet is to replace coal and oil with solar and batteries — or to grow rich using solar and batteries in the first place, skipping the fossil fuel stage entirely.
The only way this is ever going to happen is if solar power and batteries (and other green technologies) are really, really cheap. China, India, and the rest will not adopt these technologies because Greta Thunberg tells them to. They will only switch to green energy if it’s cheaper to do so.
So if we want to save the world from climate change, the only really effective way to do this is to make green energy as cheap as possible.
How do we make green energy cheap? In the past, this meant doing a bunch of scientific research, in order to drive breakthroughs in our understanding of solar and batteries. But although that research continues, and is still important, there has been a major shift; now, cost decreases come mostly from scaling effects. This is from an MIT News report on a paper by Kavlak et al. in 2018:
The relative importance of the factors [driving down solar costs] has changed over time, the study shows. In earlier years, research and development was the dominant cost-reducing high-level mechanism, through improvements to the devices themselves and to manufacturing methods. For about the last decade, however, the largest single high-level factor in the continuing cost decline has been economies of scale, as solar-cell and module manufacturing plants have become ever larger.
You can visualize this cost decline with a scaling curve, which shows how costs go down as the volume produced goes up:
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Similar curves exist for batteries. These are all specific instances of something called Wright’s Law, which says that the more you build of something, the cheaper it gets. Not every physical technology follows Wright’s Law, but solar, batteries, and many other green technologies do follow it.
This is why for many years, I wrote that the best way for the U.S. to defeat climate change was to scale up the production of solar power, batteries, and other green technologies. The Inflation Reduction Act, with its subsidies for green energy and electric vehicles, was a victory for my desired approach.
Except that victory was far too modest and short-lived. The IRA was good, but it wasn’t transformational on a global scale. And because the Republican Party has made opposition to green energy a pillar of their ideology, the Trump administration and the GOP Congress are now canceling and obstructing solar plants and battery factories, even though that will make energy more expensive for Americans.
America has abdicated the fight against climate change.
But that doesn’t mean the strategy I advocated for defeating climate change was a bad idea. In fact, it’s still going to work! It just won’t be America that executes that strategy. It will be China. In fact, it already is.
China has long subsidized the production of solar cells and wind turbines. In recent years it has also lavished enormous subsidies on the electric vehicle industry: