Dr. Wang Tao Responds to Questions on Tyndall Centre Report
Last month, I reviewed the Tyndall Center report on China’s Energy Transition: Pathways for Low Carbon Development and expressed three specific concerns. Since then, I’ve had an opportunity to exchange emails with Dr. Wang Tao (pictured right), one of the co-authors of the report. He has taken time to address my questions and has graciously agreed to have his explanations posted here.
Here are the concerns I raised on my last post, rephrased for clarity, and Dr. Wang’s responses.
1. In choosing a global carbon budget for the report’s scenario analysis, a target of 450 ppm of carbon dioxide, which translates to roughly 550 ppm carbon dioxide equivalent, is used. Is 550ppm CO2e a safe target, especially considering what we know about negative feedback loops and runaway climate change?
No. As many already know, climate change is already happening and there have been many arguments about what is a relatively safe level of carbon concentration to avoid dangerous climate change impacts. The scientific consensus has not been reached; as I have witnessed myself in the Copenhagen climate science congress in March 2009, you can hear people talking about levels from as low as 300 ppm to as high as 550ppm, yet no one is be perfectly sure. I do recognize that the 550 ppm target that we choose is at the upper end; this does not mean we accept this level as acceptable, but that is the only figure with wide scientific consensus in the IPCC AR4. I would like to reduce it to lower level if there is another widely accepted level. The report has shown that even with 550ppm CO2e it would be very difficult to reach and require significant courage from government to take radical changes soon. It is better to get them moving rather than scare them off at the first place, right? With the same methodology, you could always apply lower CO2 level if wanted, but the trajectories may look scarier. Our choice is rather a compromise between what is ideal and what is practical, as we said in the report.
2. All four low carbon scenarios in the report rely heavily on carbon storage and sequestration (CCS) technology, which has not been proven on a commercial scale. A good number of people, including GLF, are skeptical about the viability of CCS in the long term because it is, as I’ve put it before “completely unproven [on a commercial scale], imposes an energy penalty, and is very expensive.” What is your response to skeptics like us?
I am afraid we certainly have different views here. To me, CCS is a must have for China to reduce carbon emission at the rate needed to comply with the carbon emission budget. You probably already see that from our report, although with different development pathways and economic structures, the Chinese economy will in all scenarios have to improve energy efficiency rigorously and develop low carbon energy sources (either renewable or nuclear). But in order to reduce the emission as much as depicted by the trajectory (even just for 550ppm CO2e), there will still be enough coal and oil use that will blow the climate away if unabated. Therefore CCS is a must. I don’t think it is an unproven technology. It is very expensive, but with a carbon price and technology improvement (the large scale will only start in China from 2030), there is a large scope for it to be much more economically viable in the future. And we must ask, are the costs of CCS more expensive than the climate impacts that follow from letting the carbon emission unabated to the atmosphere?
The major barrier for CCS is not technical, but financial. Because the externality cost of carbon emission or the external benefit of CCS in avoiding climate change are not taken into account, there is no incentives to use CCS that will only cost power plants and customers more. But when the price mechanism is put right, it would be too expensive to use coal and not to have CCS! Of course financing mechanism is never an easy topic either.
[GLF note: See this excellent new overview on China's CCS activities by ClimateWire, posted on the NYTimes.com]
3. The low carbon scenarios envision a shift away from manufacturing towards the service and high tech industries-will those latter sectors be able to provide the same amount of jobs to maintain social order? Does this also mean China is outsourcing is highly pollutive heavy industry to other countries? Relatedly, how feasible is it for the scenarios to have agriculture, a historically and socially important sector, shrink form 15% today to about 3 to 5%.
The service and high tech and high value added industry actually provide more jobs than many heavy industries as the latter one is capital intensive or energy intensive. The service industry is a labor and skill intensive industry. If you look at the cases of US, UK, and many other developed countries, you will realize economic structural change to service and high tech industries does not create a problem of, but is instead a solution to, the unemployment issue.
For manufacturing outsourcing, you are right to question if China can outsource its manufacturing sector in the future in the way that US and EU have done before. However, there are two trends worth nothing–first, China might well reach a infrastructure saturation by 2030 and may therefore have to seriously reduce its demand on heavy industrial products; second, the heavy industries are already flowing out of China to other less developing countries because of various reasons. Theses countries will have much more lax requirements on emission than China, e.g. Vietnam and Malaysia. The key is to have high energy efficiency in these new built industries in less developed countries so they don’t follow the same track as China did.
As for agriculture, our report does not say that sector is going to shrink in absolute terms, not at all. But the value added from agriculture will be much less than service and other high value added industries, which grow much faster, therefore agriculture’s share in the whole economy reduced. Look at the economy structure of developed countries we provide in our report and you will realize it is not a strange imagination we have but the general economic trend. In this case, we are simply accelerating this same trend in China.
Dr. Wang Tao is trained as an environmental economist, receiving his Masters and PhD from the University of York in the UK, previously studying for a Bachelors of Science from Fudan University in environmental science. His recent research focuses on China’s energy and climate policy in the future, and how energy policy and low carbon technology could help China to transit to a low carbon economy. In addition to his postings at the Tyndall Center and University of Sussex, he has published articles recently for Climate Policy, the Tyndall Center, and the United Nations Human Development Report. Dr Wang is also interested in low carbon technology transfer to developing countries and has contributed to a recent report on the embodied carbon emissions in China’s international trade and their implications for international climate and trade policies. Tao remains keenly interested in the interfaces between policy, technology and business, especially in China.
