Analysis: Coronavirus has temporarily reduced China’s CO2 emissions by a quarter

As China battles one of the most serious virus epidemics of the century, the impacts on the country’s energy demand and emissions are only beginning to be felt.

A hospital in Shanghai, China, closed due to the coronavirus outbreak. Credit: Janusz Kolondra / Alamy Stock Photo

Electricity demand and industrial output remain far below their usual levels across a range of indicators, many of which are at their lowest two-week average in several years. These include:

• Coal consumption at power plants was down 36%
• Operating rates for main steel products were down by more than 15%, while crude steel production was almost unchanged
• Coal throughput at the largest coal port fell 29%
• Coking plant utilization fell 23%
• Satellite-based NO2 levels were 37% lower
• Utilization of oil refining capacity was lowered by 34%
• At their peak, flight cancellations were reducing global passenger aviation volumes by 10%, but the sector appears to be recovering, with global capacity down 5% on year in February as a whole.

All told, the measures to contain coronavirus have resulted in reductions of 15% to 40% in output across key industrial sectors. This is likely to have wiped out a quarter or more of the country’s CO2 emissions over the past four weeks, the period when activity would normally have resumed after the Chinese new-year holiday. (See methodology below.)

Over the same period in 2019, China released around 800m tonnes of CO2 (MtCO2), meaning the virus could have cut global emissions by 200MtCO2 to date. The key question is whether the impacts are sustained, or if they will be offset – or even reversed – by the government response to the crisis.

Initial analysis from the International Energy Agency (IEA) and Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) suggests the repercussions of the outbreak could shave up to half a percent off global oil demand in January-September this year.

However, the Chinese government’s coming stimulus measures in response to the disruption could outweigh these shorter-term impacts on energy and emissions, as it did after the global financial crisis and the 2015 domestic economic downturn.

A country in shutdown

Every winter, during Chinese new year, the country closes down for a week, with shops and construction sites closing and most industries winding down operations. The holiday has a significant short-term impact on energy demand, industrial output and emissions.

The blue lines on the chart below show how coal-fired power generation typically drops by an average of 50% in the 10 days following the eve of Chinese new year, marked as zero on the x-axis.

This year, shown in red, the usual fall in energy use has been prolonged by 10 days so far, with no sign of rebound. This is because the annual holiday was extended to give the government more time to get the epidemic under control – and demand has remained subdued, even after the official resumption of work on 10 February.

 Daily coal consumption around the Chinese new-year period at six generating companies reporting daily data, in 10,000 tonnes per day. X-axis shows days before and after Chinese new year eve, which falls on various dates in the second half of January or in February. Source: Analysis of data from WIND Information. Chart by Carbon Brief using Highcharts.

In the four-week period commencing 3 February this year, average coal consumption at power plants reporting daily data fell to a four-year low, with no sign of recovery in the most recent data, covering Sunday 1 March.

The short-term effect has been equally dramatic across a range of other industrial indicators, shown as 28-day averages in the figure below. The top left chart shows coal throughput at the main coal port, Qinhuangdao, which fell to the lowest level in four years in the four weeks to 1 March.

Similarly, refinery operating rates in Shandong province, the country’s main centre for oil refining, fell to the lowest level since autumn 2015 (below left), indicating a sharply reduced oil demand outlook. Furthermore, as expected, underlying demand for oil products, steel and other metals has fallen much more than output, resulting in record-high stockpiles, which will put pressure on production going forward.

Operating rates of industrial capacity in China (%). Steel product (steel bar and wire rod) operating rates show the effect of the Chinese new year holiday each year. Source:  Analysis of industry surveys reported by WIND Information. Chart by Carbon Brief using Highcharts.

Strikingly, all indicators of industrial capacity utilisation – coal power plants, blast furnaces, coking, steel products, refineries – deteriorated further in the week commencing 10 February, when business was officially expected to resume.

The rebound in industrial operation and domestic fossil fuel consumption has proven to be slow, with the first signs of the resumption of activity evident in the national aggregate data only in the past week, but still with a long way to go. This is not for lack of trying though, as some cities have reportedly even resorted to mandating factories to use more electricity, whether or not they have the personnel to resume production, in an effort to doctor a resurgence in power demand. While anecdotal, this is testimony to the massive pressure on local officials to jumpstart the economy.

Taken together, the reductions in coal and crude oil use indicate a reduction in CO2 emissions of 25% or more, compared with the same two-week period following the Chinese new year holiday in 2019. This amounts to approximately 100MtCO2 – or 6% of global emissions over the same period.

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Why You Need to Know About Regenerative Agriculture

Why companies as diverse as Patagonia and General Mills are suddenly focused on getting dirty

Maybe it’s the year-end double punch of consumerism and self-reflection—what holiday meals are we making, what are we buying for people, what have I even done with my life—but December triggers a cavalcade of questions about how a person who wears things and eats things and likes to go outside (this is me, but, hey, it could be you, too) is tied into the whole dang system of consumption.

And in that blitz, an unlikely subject has come up. Not reproductive choices, not carbon offsets, not even Greta Thunberg. No, it’s regenerative agriculture, a soil-focused farming practice. Whole Foods says it’s the number-one food trend of next year. Patagonia has made it a centerpiece of its activism and will be rolling out products made using the practice early next year. General Mills announced this spring that it will employ regenerative agriculture on one million acres—about a quarter of the land it uses in North America. And this spring will see the creation of a new Renewable Organic Agriculture certification pilot program.

That’s a huge deal, environmentally, because the agriculture sector is responsible for about a quarter of global greenhouse emissions. Ag creates food and fiber and jobs. And when it’s done right, it can act as a carbon sink. Healthy soil, with intact root systems, can hold huge amounts of carbon. According to the International Panel on Climate Change, agriculture is unique in its ability to both reduce emissions, through sustainable farming practices, and capture them, through carbon sequestration.

That’s where regenerative agriculture comes in. There are 7.5 billion living organisms in a teaspoon of soil—more than there are people living on earth—and regenerative ag supports those organisms, helping them hold nutrients, fighting erosion, and negating the need for chemicals. Estimates from Ohio State’s Carbon Management and Sequestration Center say carbon sequestration through regenerative practices could offset fossil fuel emission by up to 15 percent. Loftier assumptions from the United Nations say it could offset total global emissions by 10 percent.

The term was coined in the 1980s at the Rodale Institute, the Pennsylvania-based organic farming think tank founded by J.J. Rodale. In practice, it means that farmers rotate and diversify crops and animals, don’t poison lands and water, and minimize tilling and soil disruption. Over time, those practices have been shown to make land more resilient and more productive—and able to hold more carbon and water.

The Regenerative Organic Alliance (ROA), a nonprofit coalition of organic companies like Dr. Bronner’s, Patagonia, and Horizon Organic, has built a certification for regenerative producers around three connected pillars: soil health, animal welfare, and social fairness. This ROA certification emcompasses not just organic practices, but also long-term soil health and economic benefits for farmers.

As an apparel company, Patagonia may seem an odd bedfellow in this mission. But since 2012, when it first offered wild salmon jerky, the company has moved into the sustainable food space, launching Patagonia Provisions in 2014 and working to secure responsible farming, ranching, and aquaculture partners. The more they learned, says Patagonia Provisions managing director Birgit Cameron, the more they realized that food was one of the biggest levers the company could push to help the planet.

Starting in February, Patagonia will offer clothes grown with cotton farmed to the new Renewable Organic Agriculture standard, and soon afterwards, ROA-certified food. The company already sells a beer called Long Root Ale, which is brewed with a perennial grain called Kernza grown using ROA practices. “You do start to see higher yield, and the soil draws down a significant amount of carbon, which is a planetary game changer,” Cameron says. “We couldn’t stay away from that.”

It’s worth remembering, however, that agriculture is just part of the climate pie. Elizabeth Whitlow, executive director of the Regenerative Organic Alliance, warns against assuming that sequestering carbon in soil will cancel out growing emissions. But she and Cameron are realistically hopeful, and talking with them helped turn my grinchy heart and brain. We need to start making decisions through the lens of urgency, Cameron reminded me, and good consumer choices can indeed move the needle on agriculture practices—and climate change.

So this spring, as the first green shoots push through the soil, look for the ROA certification. Talk to your local farmers about where your food is coming from and how it’s produced. The idea of voting with your dollars may be trite, but food is a place where personal action can impact the system. As Whitlow says, “What we do to the soil, we do to ourselves.” SOURCE

Climate researchers launch online tool to help local governments set carbon targets

Researchers are using the latest climate science to help local authorities calculate their carbon budget and cut down on emissions in the midst of the current climate crisis.

Scientists from The University of Manchester and the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research have developed an online tool which is now being used by local authorities including Manchester to understand their role in meeting the climate change objectives set by the UN.

The unique new tool, announced today, allows users to calculate a carbon budget for any UK administrative area larger than local authority scale, and set climate change targets which meet the objectives of the United Nations Paris Agreement on Climate Change.

The tool is based on latest synthesis report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) on how quantities of carbon dioxide emissions from human activities relate to global warming.

Dr Chris Jones from The University of Manchester who helped develop the tool said: “Our approach applies principles from the Paris Agreement to scale this global carbon budget down to the UK and a set of clearly stated allocation principles to share the carbon budget between local areas.

“This is a practical and straightforward way for local and devolved governments in the UK to translate the implications of the Paris Agreement into carbon reduction commitments based on the latest science.”

The Tyndall carbon budget tool is a particularly relevant resource for local authorities who have declared a climate emergency. By using the tool authorities can better understand the scale of the challenge when addressing climate change through local action.

…“Having seen the carbon budgets, the important thing now is to work with all of our stakeholders in a concentrated effort to develop and undertake action to move us forward.”

The tool calculates a maximum carbon budget for the selected area, as well as projected emissions reduction pathway, interim carbon budgets and average emissions reduction rate. The tool provides a downloadable PDF covering the method, results and recommendations for the carbon budget. The tool is free to use and is compatible with the SCATTER carbon footprint tool  and CDP sustainability reporting. MORE

Marc Jaccard: Emissions will rise under the Conservative climate plan

Conservative climate plan shows emissions will rise, as the proposed tools are not proven to work.

Unfortunately, Canadian politicians have rarely implemented the essential carbon pricing and/or regulatory policies. Instead, they offer lists of activities and programs that are either silent on policy or suggest that non-compulsory policies, like information campaigns or subsidies, will cause significant reductions – which is not the case. The Conservative Party’s proposed climate plan fits this pattern, and my modelling suggests it would ultimately result in increased GHG emissions between 2020 and 2030….

Ottawa’s current GHG forecast

In several past evaluations, I and my research associates have correctly forecast when government policies would have negligible effect, even though governments at the time claimed they would have a significant effect….

Evaluation

I limit this evaluation to one metric: GHG reduction. The Conservative Party has emphasized that its climate plan saves money for Canadians. This might be true, but it is important for Canadians to know whether the reason is because the plan does not reduce emissions. A plan that has little effect on emissions might well have lower energy costs. In this case, however, one would expect an honest politician to say, “My climate plan allows GHG emissions to keep rising so that energy costs do not.”

In contrast with the Liberal climate policies, the Conservative climate plan is more challenging to model because its emission and technology claims are assumed to happen without carbon pricing and mostly without regulations. Each of these claims must be assessed individually before combining the policies to perform a simulation. Thus, in the evaluation that follows, I shift from discussing actions (like fuel switching or energy efficiency) to discussing the effectiveness of the proposed policies for causing these actions to happen.

1. The Conservative climate plan would eliminate the federal backstop carbon price. This means that while provincial government carbon prices applied to consumers and firms in Quebec and BC would remain, carbon pollution would be free elsewhere in Canada. A price on carbon pollution causes more adoption than otherwise of low-emission vehicles, electricity plants, buildings and industrial equipment. Unless the removed carbon price is replaced with regulations that require increased adoption of technologieFs like the zero-emission vehicle mandate of Quebec and BC, such GHG-reducing actions would decline, and emissions would rise.
2. The Conservative plan would eliminate the Clean Fuel Standard and instead “work to increase the availability and use of renewable fuels.” The CFS is a regulation that increases the use of renewable fuels and electricity. Decades of evidence shows that this increase will not occur voluntarily in energy markets, which is why carbon pricing and regulations are essential. Removal of the CFS regulation would decrease renewable fuel use, and emissions would rise.
3. The Conservative plan would eliminate the Output Based Pricing System, which charges industry the backstop carbon price for emissions in excess of an emission standard. The Conservative plan claims it would also have emission standards for large industry, but does not say whether these would be more or less stringent than those in the current Output Based Pricing System. One must assume they would be less stringent because if they were as stringent (or more stringent), the plan would say this. Where industry fails to meet the standards, the Conservative climate plan would require industry to make investments under a new Green Investment Standards Certification program. It is impossible to estimate with confidence whether this program would reduce emissions from what they otherwise would be. History has shown that industry can appear to be reducing emissions simply by making emission-reducing investments that would have occurred anyway. The replacement of the Output Based Pricing System with this program will increase emissions.
4. The proposals of the Conservative plan for each key sector reveal that the intent is to replace the carbon pricing and regulatory policies of the federal government with information and subsidy policies, although this is never stated explicitly. An example is the plan’s lead slogan “green technology, not taxes.” This sounds alluring. But independent experts have frequently explained and empirically demonstrated why green technology innovation is most effective when incentivized by carbon pricing or regulations that make these technologies financially attractive. Based on the evidence, it would be irresponsible to assume that the following subsidies and voluntary initiatives would reduce emissions:

• The proposed Green Technology and Innovation Fund should have very little effect on emissions and would be difficult to measure because of the inability to know whether the investments that are funded would have occurred anyway.
• The proposed Green Home Tax Credit would likewise have little effect on emissions because most recipients would receive the credit for investments they would have made anyway. A large literature shows the high free-riding effect in such programs.
• The proposed Green Patent Credit is based on the myth that a dearth of low-emission technologies prevents us from reducing GHG emissions. In fact, it is the low cost of burning fossil fuels (and the low or zero cost of CO2 emissions) that prevents us from running vehicles, heating homes and processing materials with known, commercially-available zero-emission technologies that use electricity or bioenergy. The green patent credit is likely to have no effect on emissions.
• The proposed Green Home Retrofit Code is an information program that, like others, will have negligible effect in the absence of carbon pricing or regulations.
• The proposed Net-Zero Ready Building Standard will have no effect. A significant percentage of buildings already use electricity for space conditioning (heating or air conditioning) and water heating, and virtually all buildings can be converted to be 100 percent electric or a mix of electricity and bioenergy at any time. They will shift to net zero when carbon pricing or regulations make it economical to replace natural gas and heating oil with electricity or to substitute biomethane into the natural-gas grid.
• The proposed Energy Savings Performance Contracting program is a subsidy program in that it reduces financing costs for people investing in energy efficiency upgrades that are paid off through bill savings. Such programs have existed for decades. Research consistently shows that they have a negligible effect since the extra financial leeway also enables home retrofitters to expand floor area and energy-related services.
• The proposed Greening the Grid initiative uses words like “foster” and “pursue.” If the coal plant phase-out regulation of the Liberal government is rescinded (the Conservative plan is silent on this), and the Output Based Pricing System is eliminated, the effect will be significantly greater GHG emissions in the Canadian electricity sector relative to the scenario in which all policies are frozen at their 2019 condition.

The following figure provides my estimate of the evolution of Canadian GHG emissions under the Conservative climate plan. As expected, the removal of carbon pricing and key regulations, and their replacement with voluntary programs and modest subsidies, would lead to Canadian emissions that continue to increase between 2020 and 2030. And this is even under the assumption that oil sands production in Canada would not grow appreciably.

The climate plan unveiled by the Conservative Party of Canada in June 2019 is a throwback to an earlier era in which climate-insincere politicians tried to trick climate-concerned citizens into believing that they were taking action to reduce GHG emissions with information and subsidy programs alongside vague statements about GHG-reducing actions that somehow occur without carbon pricing and/or regulations. In reality, carbon prices must rise or regulations for technology and energy must become more stringent. There is no other way to significantly decarbonize the economy. The world’s leading independent experts all agree on this. MORE