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Smog clouds China's success

The "world's factory" leads the U.S. in carbon dioxide output.

By ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published June 21, 2007

BEIJING - China has overtaken the United States as the world's top producer of carbon dioxide emissions - the biggest man-made contributor to global warming - based on the latest widely accepted energy consumption data, a Dutch research group says.

According to a report released Tuesday by the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency, China overtook the United States in emissions of carbon dioxide by 8 percent in 2006. While China was 2 percent below the United States in 2005, voracious coal consumption and increased cement production caused the numbers to rise rapidly, the group said.

"It's an expression of their fast industrial production activities and their fast development, " Jos G.J. Olivier, the agency's senior scientist who compiled the figures, said Wednesday. The agency is independent but paid by the Dutch government to advise it on environmental policy.

The study said China, which relies on coal for two-thirds of its energy needs and makes 44 percent of the world's cement, produced 6.2-billion metric tons of carbon dioxide in 2006. In comparison, the United States, which gets half its electricity from coal, produced 5.8-billion metric tons of carbon dioxide, it said.

The group's analysis makes sense and had been predicted to happen by 2009 or 2010, said experts from the United Nations and the U.S. Energy Information Administration, and outside academics.

"The Dutch agency referred to BP statistics, which is the standard reference tool. We have no reason to doubt that the numbers are right. We have no reason to doubt the methodology, " said John Christensen, head of the U.N. Environment Program's Center on Energy, Climate and Sustainable Development in Denmark. "It's been stated many times that China will overtake the U.S. in emissions."

The research was based on data on fossil fuel consumption from BP PLC's Review of Energy 2007, compiled by the British oil company, and cement production data through 2006 published by the U.S. Geological Survey, Olivier said.

Other sources of carbon dioxide, such as deforestation and the flaring of gas in oil and gas production, are not included in the data. They also do not include methane from fuel production and agriculture and nitrous oxide from industry.

Telephone calls to China's State Environmental Protection Agency and the National Development and Reform Commission, the Cabinet-level economic planning agency, were not answered Wednesday.

Fatih Birol, chief economist of the International Energy Agency in Paris, said the key message from the emission figures isn't who is No. 1, but the need to slow growth in carbon dioxide emissions.

Yang Ailun of Greenpeace China noted that Western consumers use products made in China.

"All the West has done is export a great slice of its carbon footprint to China and made China the world's factory, " she said.

[Last modified June 21, 2007, 00:32:08]