How well is China doing?

I've been on a bit of a posting holiday while recovering from being sick and miserable, but hey, I'm back!

There's been a few interesting things in the news of late. No, no, not about Cancun. Here's one thing:

http://blogs.ft.com/energy-source/2010/12/14/chinas-incipient-renewables-boom/

Earlier this semester I was up at Lawrence Berkeley National Labs talking with Mark Levine, a fairly senior guy up there who's group leader for their China Energy Group. He knows, in other words, a lot about what China's doing in terms of clean energy. Someone in the group asked him, in essence, whether China made everything the developed world was trying to do irrelevant because of its potential to simply blow everyone else out of the water in terms of emissions. His response was that he didn't think so at all; in fact, he said, they'd been doing analysis and his opinion based on that was the China was much closer to peaking its emissions and beginning to climb back down than most people thought.

I wasn't sure what to think about this - Mark Levine strikes me as a knowledgeable and pragmatic guy, but that was a pretty optimistic statement - but this seems like a supporting data point, with China set to beat its own targets in solar and wind for 2015 and 2020, and "Provincial plans to build out nuclear, rail and wind far exceed[ing] national targets."

This is a nice bit of optimism for its own sake. But it cheers me for another reason. Many people would say the most critical factor in making the Montreal protocol on ozone depleting substances work (Montreal being the gold standard for a successful prior environmental treaty) was that one large player had incentives to move ahead unilaterally: the US essentially decided it was economically worthwhile to go ahead with reducing ODS on its own. That unilateral movement overcame learning barriers and brought down costs for relevant technology, such that eventually joining in on action became economically sensible for more and more countries. Increasing numbers of signatories over time, and increasingly rigorous commitments over time, effectively tracked the falling costs of action as more players joined in and costs came down. (That's one story, anyway - not necessarily the emphasis every analyst would give.)

The mechanism here is a little different, I think. It's not so much that China has decided it is economically sensible to concentrate on zeroing out emissions. I have a research slave - er, undergraduate research assistant - that I'd set to learning about energy industry drivers in India. What he said to me recently was that it didn't seem like there was much competition between different parts of the energy industry; solar didn't compete with coal, because India is growing fast enough that it needs as much as it can get of each. This is true, as well, of China.

But whatever the driver, it's heartening that there IS a driver for the widescale unilateral installation of large amounts of clean power. Whether China can engage in near-term radical emissions reductions or not, its widescale installation plans, if fulfilled, will bring down costs and overcome learning barriers for other countries, such that more of them might be in a position to do so. Even if China doesn't sign in the near term, China's work might lead to more signatures on a more rigorous emissions reduction treaty.