WELCOME

But there was no government intervention. And we are only

May 11, 2019 by Lena Webb

But there was no government intervention. And we are only just beginning to understand why. One way of explaining the dramatic increase in fine-particulate pollution is that the pollution has been driven by a shift in the manufacturing of clean, affordable products.

It looks like factories have been burning coal-fired power plants to help the country's smelters meet climate goals. One reason for the shift is the shift in the price of raw materials like copper and aluminum, which is increasingly the top market for raw materials.

In May, China's government adopted a strategy that aimed to save $5.8 trillion from its carbon pollution emissions over the next 10 years. That's more than the $1 trillion in annual emissions from petroleum used by the U.S. to power cars and other vehicles. The cost to the nation comes with a $2.2 trillion cost to China of all emissions due to carbon pollution.

The goal is to reduce China's emissions by 20 percent by 2020. This will cost about $7 billion per year over the next decade.

If you want to use the carbon-dioxide-emitting power of an automobile, you'll have to build a plant using coal. But we don't have a cheap way to do this. That's why China doesn't have a clean energy policy. The government is spending $50 billion annually to build factories using coal, and it's already doing so in one of the country's largest cities, Shenzhen, and in the countryside of Henan. But it's not the only way to do that. This year the government plans to build a coal-fired power plant along with a solar farm in a city near Tianjin, which is also used as a fuel source for other cities and industries in China. In a separate effort, the government plans to build a coal-fired power plant in a city near Shanghai on the border with the US.

It's a move that will put China on track to achieve its goal of reducing carbon pollution by about 40 percent by 2040. That's a substantial shift over the past few years, but it's still a relatively small one.