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Register a new userThe role of negative emissions in meeting Chinas 2060 carbon neutrality goal
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Jay Fuhrman
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Chinas pledge to reach carbon neutrality before 2060 is an ambitious goal and could provide the world with much-needed leadership on how to limit warming to +1.5C warming above pre-industrial levels by the end of the century. But the pathways that would achieve net zero by 2060 are still unclear, including the role of negative emissions technologies. We use the Global Change Analysis Model to simulate how negative emissions technologies, in general, and direct air capture (DAC) in particular, could contribute to Chinas meeting this target. Our results show that negative emissions could play a large role, offsetting on the order of 3 GtCO2 per year from difficult-to-mitigate sectors such as freight transportation and heavy industry. This includes up to a 1.6 GtCO2 per year contribution from DAC, constituting up to 60% of total projected negative emissions in China. But DAC, like bioenergy with carbon capture and storage and afforestation, has not yet been demonstrated at anywhere approaching the scales required to meaningfully contribute to climate mitigation. Deploying NETs at these scales will have widespread impacts on financial systems and natural resources such as water, land, and energy in China.
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China is the worlds second largest economy. After four decades of economic miracles, Chinas economy is transitioning into an advanced, knowledge-based economy. Yet, we still lack a detailed understanding of the skills that underly the Chinese labor force, and the development and spatial distribution of these skills. For example, the US standardized skill taxonomy O*NET played an important role in understanding the dynamics of manufacturing and knowledge-based work, as well as potential risks from automation and outsourcing. Here, we use Machine Learning techniques to bridge this gap, creating Chinas first workforce skill taxonomy, and map it to O*NET. This enables us to reveal workforce skill polarization into social-cognitive skills and sensory-physical skills, and to explore the Chinas regional inequality in light of workforce skills, and compare it to traditional metrics such as education. We build an online tool for the public and policy makers to explore the skill taxonomy: skills.sysu.edu.cn. We will also make the taxonomy dataset publicly available for other researchers upon publication.
When facing threats from automation, a worker residing in a large Chinese city might not be as lucky as a worker in a large U.S. city, depending on the type of large city in which one resides. Empirical studies found that large U.S. cities exhibit resilience to automation impacts because of the increased occupational and skill specialization. However, in this study, we observe polarized responses in large Chinese cities to automation impacts. The polarization might be attributed to the elaborate master planning of the central government, through which cities are assigned with different industrial goals to achieve globally optimal economic success and, thus, a fast-growing economy. By dividing Chinese cities into two groups based on their administrative levels and premium resources allocated by the central government, we find that Chinese cities follow two distinct industrial development trajectories, one trajectory owning government support leads to a diversified industrial structure and, thus, a diversified job market, and the other leads to specialty cities and, thus, a specialized job market. By revisiting the automation impacts on a polarized job market, we observe a Simpsons paradox through which a larger city of a diversified job market results in greater resilience, whereas larger cities of specialized job markets are more susceptible. These findings inform policy makers to deploy appropriate policies to mitigate the polarized automation impacts.
We investigate structural change in the PR China during a period of particularly rapid growth 1998-2014. For this, we utilize sectoral data from the World Input-Output Database and firm-level data from the Chinese Industrial Enterprise Database. Starting with correlation laws known from the literature (Fabricants laws), we investigate which empirical regularities hold at the sectoral level and show that many of these correlations cannot be recovered at the firm level. For a more detailed analysis, we propose a multi-level framework, which is validated with empirically. For this, we perform a robust regression, since various input variables at the firm-level as well as the residuals of exploratory OLS regressions are found to be heavy-tailed. We conclude that Fabricants laws and other regularities are primarily characteristics of the sectoral level which rely on aspects like infrastructure, technology level, innovation capabilities, and the knowledge base of the relevant labor force. We illustrate our analysis by showing the development of some of the larger sectors in detail and offer some policy implications in the context of development economics, evolutionary economics, and industrial organization.
In September 2020, President Xi Jinping announced that China strives to achieve carbon neutrality before 2060. This ambitious and bold commitment was well received by the global community. However, the technology and pathway are not so clear. Here, we conducted an extensive review covering more than 200 published papers and summarized the key technologies to achieve carbon neutrality. We projected sectoral CO2 emissions for 2020-2050 based on our previous studies and published scenarios. We applied a medium sink scenario for terrestrial sinks due to the potential resource competition and included an ocean sink, which has generally not been included in previous estimates. We analyzed and revisited Chinas historical terrestrial carbon sink capacity from 1980-2020 based on multiple models and a literature review. To achieve neutrality, it is necessary to increase sink capacity and decrease emissions from many sources. On the one hand, critical measures to reduce emissions include decreasing the use of fossil fuels; substantially increasing the proportion of the renewable energy and nuclear energy. On the other hand, the capacity of future carbon sinks is projected to decrease due to the natural evolution of terrestrial ecosystems, and anthropogenic management practices are needed to increase sink capacity, including increasing the forest sinks through national ecological restoration projects and large-scale land greening campaigns; increasing wood harvesting and storage; and developing CCUS. This paper provides basic source and sink data,and established and promising new technologies for decreasing emissions and increasing sinks for use by the scientific community and policy makers.
In the Paris agreement of 2015, it was decided to reduce the CO2 emissions of the energy sector to zero by 2050 and to restrict the global mean temperature increase to 1.5 degree Celcius above the pre-industrial level. Such commitments are possible only with practically CO2-free power generation based on variable renewable technologies. Historically, the main point of criticism regarding renewable power is the variability driven by weather dependence. Power-to-X systems, which convert excess power to other stores of energy for later use, can play an important role in offsetting the variability of renewable power production. In order to do so, however, these systems have to be scheduled properly to ensure they are being powered by low-carbon technologies. In this paper, we introduce a graphical approach for scheduling power-to-X plants in the day-ahead market by minimizing carbon emissions and electricity costs. This graphical approach is simple to implement and intuitively explain to stakeholders. In a simulation study using historical prices and CO2 intensity for four different countries, we find that the price and CO2 intensity tends to decrease with increasing scheduling horizon. The effect diminishes when requiring an increasing amount of full load hours per year. Additionally, investigating the trade-off between optimizing for price or CO2 intensity shows that it is indeed a trade-off: it is not possible to obtain the lowest price and CO2 intensity at the same time.
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