This huge energy transition – with the technologies currently standing at 1,408GW – can make a “decisive contribution” to the country’s climate efforts and bring big economic rewards, the China Energy Transformation Outlook 2024 (CETO24) shows.
The report was produced by our research team at the Energy Research Institute of the Chinese Academy of Macroeconomic Research – a “national high-end thinktank” of China’s top planner the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC).
The outlook looks at two pathways to meeting China’s “dual-carbon” climate goals and its wider aims for economic and social development.
In the first pathway, a challenging geopolitical environment constrains international cooperation.
The second assumes international climate cooperation continues despite broader geopolitical tensions.
We find that, under both scenarios, China’s energy system can achieve net-zero carbon emissions before 2060, paving the way to make Chinese society as a whole carbon neutral before 2060.
However, the outlook shows that meeting these policy goals will not be possible unless China improves its energy efficiency, sustains its electrification efforts and develops a power system built around “intelligent” grids that are predominantly supplied with electricity from solar and wind.
A) state capitalism isn’t a thing. The vast majority of industries are just socialist. They exist without profit motive exclusively for the benefit of the Chinese people. The private sector industries interact with the outside world and make up less than 40% of GDP. It’s why ‘chinas house market collapsing’ has made exactly zero people homeless and has caused exactly zero people to not have a job. The private luxury housing market collapsed, which makes up a tiny fraction of all housing, and mostly just exists for foreign investors.
B) China allows nonessential capitalist markets because capitalism is a required stepping stone of development in industry, and it makes imperialist powers like the US and eu far less invadey if they can make money off you.
C) it’d be great if China’s goal was degrowth but that’s not really fair, and that’s simply not their goal. Their goal is a good life for every citizen, utilizing capitalism to build industries that later become nationalized, unionized, and by extension less wasteful.
The ussr proved you can’t skip the wasteful capitalism stage of development, even if you provide an okay life you’ll eventually get some asshole that sees America’s array of twenty billion brands of cereal with the same ingredients and use that as some flimsy way of saying socialism sucks. That’s why dengism has worked better than the ussrs approach, and why China’s current approach is beating out every other country on growth, increase in quality of life, increase in education rates, while reducing the number of billionaires in society.