Can China achieve its ambitious climate pledges? | Hongqiao Liu

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4.1 • 11.9K Ratings

🗓️ 26 October 2021

⏱️ 10 minutes

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Summary

In 2020, China’s President Xi Jinping pledged that China would both peak its emissions by 2030 and achieve net-zero emissions by 2060 -- a change that will require action at an unheard-of scale and speed. Can the country actually achieve this ambitious vision? In this forward-looking talk, environmental journalist and analyst Hongqiao Liu explores what the world’s largest carbon emitter (and second-largest economy) will need to do to get there.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	It's TED Talks Daily. I'm Elise Hu. Climate change will not be curbed without the commitment of China,
0:10.0	which is the size of the U.S., but four times the population. And it's the world's largest emitter.
0:15.8	In her talk from the Countdown Summit in 2021, journalist and policy expert Hong Chao Liu shares the potential and possible
0:22.4	pitfalls for the Chinese role in bringing down emissions at scale to keep the planet from burning.
0:31.3	Last year, China's leadership in Pied made a historic pledge to fight global warming.
0:37.7	China was strived to pick carbon dioxide emissions before 2030
0:40.9	and achieve carbon neutrality before 2016.
0:45.8	But what do those commitments actually mean?
0:49.9	First, let's consider the magnitude of these pledges.
0:53.8	They call for domestic climate actions at an unprecedented speed and scale.
0:59.8	Due to the size of China, they were also mattered globally.
1:05.1	China is as large as the US, with four times the population.
1:10.7	With double-digit annual economy growth in the past 40 years,
1:14.3	China has become the world's second largest economy in 2010.
1:18.4	And the story of China being the world's largest emitter
1:21.6	is a fairly recent one when I was born.
1:25.0	The emissions in China was only half of the US, it only became the largest
1:30.4	about 15 years ago. In 2019, China represents 28% of global CO2 emissions. Its emissions are so
1:39.6	significant today that going net zero before 2060 could prevent a 0.2 to 0.3 degree of global warming
1:47.8	and bring down 215 billion tons of CO2 emissions in the next 40 years.
1:54.9	And that is equivalent to its cumulative emissions in the past half century.
2:01.1	So, why do China emit so much?
	...

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