News and Outreach: Valerie Karplus

The latest numbers show China is using more coal and energy than previously thought, but the last two years of data suggest China’s coal use may be peaking earlier than expected.

Valerie Karplus | ChinaFAQs

Based on recent economic developments and the newly-released Thirteenth Five-Year Plan, China is well on its way to reaching its climate goal of peak CO₂ emissions by 2030.

The Plan charts the overarching course of China’s economic and social development through 2020, and will be translated into plans for provinces and specific sectors like energy in the coming months and years. The national plan, by reflecting the government’s high-level priorities, provides important momentum toward meeting China’s climate change commitments.

In many respects, the Plan hews closely to the goals set out in the country’s previous long-term energy plans and its climate policy commitments for the Paris Agreement. China’s pledge included targets to reach peak CO₂ emissions around 2030 (with the intention to peak earlier), by reducing the CO₂ intensity of economic activity by 60-65% by 2030 relative to 2005, and raising the share of non-fossil energy in the country’s energy mix to around 20% by 2030.

In crafting the Plan, China’s policymakers have emphasized the role of both the expansion of low-carbon energy and continued improvements in energy efficiency. It suggests that even in the face of slower growth, top policymakers recognize that both strategies are consistent with the country’s latest growth targets.

Moving forward on climate and energy

Generally speaking, the Plan is in step with the country’s National Energy Development Plan, released in 2014, which calls for substantial increases in clean and renewable energy deployment through 2020. While the new Five-Year Plan does not mention targets for installed electricity generation capacity, it reaffirms the country’s existing target to raise the non-fossil share of energy use to 15% by 2020. To achieve this goal, China’s National Energy Administration has stated that China will need a total of 250 gigawatts (GW) of wind power capacity, and 150 GW of solar, which would exceed the targets set in 2014 by 50 gigawatts each. (China is also aiming for 350 GW of hydropower capacity by 2020.) Realizing the full generation potential of wind and solar capacity—and its contribution to the country’s non-fossil target—will require reforms that introduce greater flexibility in dispatch and allow balancing across larger grid areas.

Nuclear and biomass are also slated to expand substantially, by 38-49 GW and 30 GW, respectively (Bloomberg New Energy Finance). Expansion of the country’s natural gas infrastructure is also likely to facilitate increased use, which has not occurred as fast as anticipated through 2015.

Energy efficiency will also be critical, especially realizing efficiencies in the parts of the economy that policy doesn’t easily reach. Indeed, many of the large energy users and emitters have cleaned up substantially in recent years in response to energy efficiency directives and technology upgrades. While there may be little low hanging fruit left in some segments of the economy, finding, reaping, and quantifying the remaining opportunities for energy efficiency improvement will be an important task in the Thirteenth FYP.

The creation of a national carbon trading market—focused on large enterprises in high-emitting sectors—will help to support this transition. Set to launch in 2017, the system will price in a portion of the damages of fossil energy use, encouraging clean energy substitution and innovation over the longer term. Finding ways to expand the coverage of the carbon price to smaller and more distributed emitters offers a promising way to expand cost-effective reductions, while preventing “leakage” of emitting activities from covered to un-covered sectors.

As in past Plans, the Thirteenth FYP lays out energy and CO₂ intensity reduction targets. The plan targets an energy intensity reduction of 15% (the Twelfth FYP targeted 16%, while the Eleventh FYP targeted 20%). The targeted CO₂ intensity reductions of 18%, compared to 17% for the Twelfth Five-Year Plan, will boost the contribution of low-carbon sources in the energy mix and support further decoupling of China’s economic growth from its reliance on fossil energy. This shift is already well underway—China’s share of coal in primary energy has dropped from over 72% in 2007 to 64% in 2016. The CO₂ market will be designed to contribute substantially to sustaining reductions in CO₂ intensity, in line with the 18% goal.

A shift toward consumption and services

A shift away from investment and exports toward consumption and services as key economic growth drivers in the coming years now seems to be underway in earnest, and will further contribute to reductions in emissions, relative to a no-shift scenario. In this regard, the government’s objectives are aligned with domestic environmental goals. China’s progress provides lessons for emerging economies generally to help in avoiding an emissions-intensive development path.

All of these developments, while not surprising, are reassuring. Combined with the 6.5%/year average annual growth the Plan targets, the latest energy and CO₂ intensity goals could translate into a CO₂ emissions peak well before 2030, in keeping with China’s pledge to make best efforts to peak early.

Author Information: Dr. Valerie J. Karplus, a ChinaFAQs expert, is an Assistant Professor in the Global Economics and Management Group at the MIT Sloan School of Management, and is the Faculty Lead of the China Energy and Climate Project in the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change.

ChinaFAQs is a project facilitated by the World Resources Institute that provides insight into critical questions about Chinese policy and action on energy and climate change. The ChinaFAQs network is comprised of U.S.-based experts, including researchers at U.S. universities and government laboratories, independent scholars, and other professionals. 

Photo: Kaj17 via Flickr  Creative Commons License   

Experts examine how MIT can be most effective in addressing climate-change issues

Helen Hill | EAPS

The MIT Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS), together with the Lorenz Center and the MIT Alumni Association, are hosting a climate symposium on Jan. 27 in the Kirsch Auditorium of the Stata Center (Room 32-123).

While this event is now fully subscribed, the day's proceedings will be available via a live webcast. (Register to watch.)

Taking action on climate change has become a dominating issue — globally, nationally, locally, and even here at MIT. Yet so many questions remain. How much and how quickly will climate change? How will these changes manifest, and where? What are the greatest risks posed by a changing climate and how likely are these worst-case outcomes? What is the science behind climate change, and how can basic research inform our efforts to avert, mitigate and adapt to its impacts?

Essential knowledge built through basic climate research lies at the core of all these questions. We would not even recognize that Earth’s climate is changing were it not for the cumulative efforts of climate scientists over the past five decades, many of them here at MIT. And we cannot hope to improve the climate outcome for ourselves and future generations without the vital, ongoing contributions of fundamental climate science research.

Touching on everything from the essentials of planetary climate through the complexities of Earth’s climate system to the challenges of finding the will to act on our knowledge to address current climate change, the symposium features talks and discussion by faculty experts from across the spectrum of climate research at MIT, plus keynote speakers Marcia McNutt (editor-in-chief of Science) and Justin Gillis (environmental science writer for The New York Times).

Speakers include:

Daniel Cziczo, MIT Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences
Elfatih A. B. Eltahir, MIT Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Lindy Elkins-Tanton, Arizona State University
Kerry Emanuel, MIT Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences
John Fernandez, MIT Environmental Solutions Initiative
W. Eric L. Grimson, MIT Chancellor for Academic Advancement
Valerie Karplus, MIT Sloan School of Management
Thomas Malone, MIT Sloan School of Management
John Marshall, MIT Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences
David McGee, MIT Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences
Ronald Prinn, MIT Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences
Sara Seager, MIT Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences
Noelle Selin, MIT Institute for Data, Systems and Society and Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences
Lawrence Susskind, MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning
Dennis Whyte, MIT Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering
Maria Zuber, MIT vice president for research

For more information and a detailed agenda, visit the EAPS symposium website.

Image: Jennifer Fentress/EAPS

Valerie Karplus and Michael Davidson | MIT Joint Program

After two weeks of negotiations, the Paris climate talks that ended on December 12 delivered the foundations of a post-2020 climate regime.

To advance climate change mitigation efforts, the new agreement incorporates national targets for greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions for 2025/2030, a new five-year cycle to establish subsequent targets, a reporting and review placeholder, and official stocktaking two years prior to those submissions to compare global progress against long-term goals.

In Paris, 189 of 195 participating countries pledged action in the form of intended nationally determined contributions, or INDCs. These pledges will be assessed in 2018 to encourage countries, where possible, to increase the level of ambition.

The review mechanism agreed on in Paris is a crucial first step. The new climate regime has also been lauded for its transparency provisions, which will be essential to establishing trust in the review process.

Implementing the pledge review process laid out in Paris will not be easy, but it is necessary to have a chance of ratcheting up efforts over time to meet the agreement’s ultimate goal of limiting global temperature rise to well below 2 degrees Celsius.

It is here that research universities and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) will have an important role to play.

A transparent review process

A functioning review process will require open and collaborative participation of signatory countries but should not rely solely on an expanded global bureaucracy. The vast majority of third-party analysis on countries’ energy and climate policies comes from academic and nongovernmental organizations, which should be strengthened following Paris.

Official reporting and review processes have existed since the framework convention in 1992. Over time, they have evolved to include periodic communications and highly structured reviews – differentiated by developing and developed countries – performed by a small set of accredited UN experts and other countries themselves. Paris strengthened these requirements by requiring, among other items, all major economies to submit biennial reports and a unified review of all countries' submissions.

Many parts of the current agreement are placeholders for detailed provisions to be decided over the coming years. We argue that in the new architecture of bottom-up pledges, the international community has an increased responsibility to assess levels of effort and abilities to scale up successful approaches.

Because of the complexity of nations' institutions, these mechanisms should be designed to enhance both the quality and impact of research outside formal UN processes. In particular, to both assess and support country pledges with an aim to accelerating global emissions reductions, we need significantly more transparency on pledges and policies and a flexible review process that can respond to concerns from academia.

Measurable and model-able pledges allow research communities to arrive separately at their own assessments of countries’ relative levels of effort and progress toward national commitments.

For example, using a countrywide energy-economic model of China, our collaborative team of researchers from Tsinghua University and MIT estimated annual reductions of over four Gigatons CO2 per year in 2030 in a scenario consistent with that country’s Paris pledge compared to a no-policy case. This reduction would equal approximately three times Japan’s CO2 emissions in 2014. More importantly, this work helped policymakers in and outside of China understand how policies then under consideration could help the country reach peak CO2 emissions in 2030, with the help of a CO2 price.

Many other groups arrived independently at estimates of available CO2 emissions reductions from the Chinese economy. It is exercises like these that offer transparency, credibility and – perhaps most importantly – an opportunity to probe and enhance a shared understanding of the implications of national commitments that remain at arm’s length from the political arena.

Beyond pledges

Assessments of pledge progress reports would naturally be more convincing if accompanied by a suite of policy actions and planned changes in existing institutions and processes to facilitate implementation.

To reinforce pledges, countries are called on in the agreement to submit “information necessary to track progress.” More concretely, they should be asked to compile a list of implementing directives, challenges faced and proposed pathways, given that most governments are establishing domestic policies prior to announcing them on the global stage in future climate talks.

For instance, the US’ Clean Power Plan, a crucial policy in the absence of nationwide climate legislation, will face significant court challenges.

Reporting requirements should explicitly recognize these domestic policy constraints, allowing the scientific and modeling community to consider their implications and investigate, as needed, alternative policy pathways.

Data challenges

A transparent, arm’s-length review process will also help to generate internationally credible assessments of GHG abatement efforts in developing countries, where accounting challenges are significant.

As a case in point, China, which targets a 60%-65% reduction in its CO2 intensity in 2030, relative to 2005 levels, is well known for its challenges in reporting accurate data. The country recently revised upward how much coal it has been burning every year by as much as 17%.

Indeed, data revisions will occur, particularly in developing countries that are in the process of establishing data collection systems.

The biennial reporting requirement agreed to in Paris can provide a regular avenue to incorporate revisions. The research community can also help by incorporating revisions into models and assessing implications for meeting emissions goals.

Negotiators further agreed that national commitments should be communicated to “facilitate clarity, transparency and understanding.” This should extend to the range of assumptions and calculation methodologies.

For example, conventions for calculating the nonfossil share of primary energy differs among countries and agencies. China uses the coal-equivalent method, which equates electricity use to the coal use it displaces, while the International Energy Agency employs the direct-equivalent method, which yields smaller percentages for a given level of deployment.

Another benefit of engaging research communities is scaled-up technical analysis and support, while added redundancy allows for multiple independent assessments of progress. These assessments can help identify and laud when countries exceed their goals, encourage upward revisions by expanding successful programs, identify reasons for slow progress and inform technological and policy solutions.

Peer-reviewed pledges

Transparency is critical, and redundancy will further limit – although not entirely avoid – any efforts to undermine the integrity of the process.

Building on previous pledging systems, an important change in Paris was to create a common technical expert review, composed of a limited number of accredited experts with special training. These experts could play an important role in knowledge assessment and synthesis of the country analysis outside experts deliver. In addition, the review should be constructed to allow for official clarification of methodologies such as those raised above.

Stocktaking processes will also be decided over the coming years, and galvanizing a wide range of civil society researchers will likewise be critical to success. The range of emissions gap reports in advance of Paris, a case in point, illuminated important assumptions for future trends such as expected levels of future efforts, or ratcheting.

The requirement to take stock every five years has the potential to become a focal point for wide-ranging studies on long-term goals.

Engaging the broader community

The Paris agreement institutionalizes a periodic review of pledges such that countries are expected to come back both with increased commitments and progress reports. This process will be absolutely critical if we are to come close to achieving the most ambitious climate change mitigation goals embodied in the Paris agreement.

Engaging the broader research community in the review process is our best hope for generating credible estimates of how we are doing as a planet. A critical part of this will be equipping researchers in developing countries to participate as equal partners in this assessment effort.

Up to now, pledges have been the key measure of a climate regime’s success. But only if it devotes just as much ambition to review as it does to pledges can the new global climate regime truly deliver.

Authors

Valerie J Karplus, Assistant Professor of Global Economics and Management, MIT Sloan School of Management

Michael Davidson, PhD Candidate in engineering systems , Massachusetts Institute of Technology

The Conversation is a collaboration between editors and academics to provide informed news analysis and commentary that’s free to read and republish.

Photo: Valerie Karplus takes questions at a panel discussion held by the MIT Club of Paris during the COP21 talks. (Source: Emily Dahl/MIT Energy Initiative)

MIT events throughout climate talks underscore Institute's global perspectives and partnerships

Posted by Michael Davidson and Valerie Karplus on Dec 11, 2015

From the Paris Climate Negotiations

National goal-setting—an expected key outcome from the Paris climate talks currently underway—is a common fixture of policy-making in China and many other countries. Collectively, the current pledges still show significant gaps toward meeting long-term climate goals. Nevertheless, they represent an important increase in scope and ambition over those pledged in advance of the 2009 Copenhagen summit, and those established earlier under the Kyoto Protocol. There is great importance in—and a growing consensus around—enhancing these previous rounds of commitments through a pledge-and-review institution, which if designed properly can also mobilize domestic constituencies even across a wide range of political systems. As China and other countries begin to consider their next steps, we explain here the interaction of international and domestic policy-making in setting climate action targets in China.

China’s Increasingly Stringent International Commitments

China in particular stands out for its evolution over this period as it has taken on increasingly stringent international commitments in tandem with massive climate and energy programs at home. Looking at its domestic constituencies—including extremely powerful fossil fuel and local government interests that are net losers under a carbon control program without compensation—this transition over the span of less than a decade is striking.

Economic advantages as a major clean energy equipment exporter, international pressure as China transitioned to the world’s largest emitter, and pervasive concerns over air pollution have helped persuade central policymakers. In turn, we find that central figures have created and used international pledges (outer – Wai) as a lever to push for and prioritize domestic action (inner – Nei). To understand how this works, we describe how underneath China’s unitary central government lies a complex policy-making hierarchy, which reinforces actions and realigns interest groups to further a transition toward low-carbon energy sources.

Climate Targets in Three Flavors

China’s energy-related climate targets come in three flavors: 1) intensity-based targets with respect to economic growth; 2) shares of energy supply, i.e., minimum non-fossil proportion of primary energy; and, most recently, 3) a CO2 peaking year (though not peaking amount). A sudden increase in energy-intensive production over 2002-2005 created concerns of energy insecurity and led to the establishment of the first flavor, energy intensity “binding targets” (约束性目标) in the 11th Five-Year-Plan (2006-2010). A medium-term target of the second flavor, to achieve a non-fossil energy share in primary energy¹ of 15% by 2020, was established in a 2007 energy strategy document together with a range of other expansion goals meant more as guidelines than targets. At that point in time, there was no discussion of peaking emissions on the horizon.

In studies of China’s governance system—especially the target-setting process—it is well-known that more targets are given than are expected to be followed. Thus, prioritizing central directives is a crucial exercise for provincial governments, the typical implementing institutions (state-owned enterprises are the other). These decisions are made based on different assessments of importance, but binding targets established in five-year-plans as well as internationalized commitments are given high weight.

In 2010, on the heels of the Copenhagen climate talks, it was announced that several provinces were behind schedule in reducing energy intensity. Premier Wen Jiabao, who had delivered China’s international climate commitment, became the central domestic figure rounding up the laggards. China’s pledge in preparation for those talks also raised the non-fossil energy target out of obscurity and enshrined a CO2 intensity objective, which joined energy as a binding target in the 12th Five-Year-Plan released two years later.

Over the next five years, China’s central agencies set forth a number of climate and energy policies, ranging from traditional mandatory approaches such as scaled-up industrial energy efficiency mandates to newer economic incentives such as standardized electricity tariffs for all renewable energies and carbon cap-and-trade pilots. These had the support of the important National Leading Group on Climate Change, Energy Conservation and Emissions Reduction, which in turn has cited responsibility to meet internationalized commitments.

Inside China’s Policymaking

A simplified sketch of the importance of highly publicized goals, using the recent round of electricity reform as an example, is instructive. In 2013, central party leaders set guiding principles on a new round of market reforms through small leading groups—which have a long history of directing central policy—chaired by President Xi Jinping, and last year set timetables for specific reforms. Language—e.g., related to the role of the market—was translated into a high-level State Council energy strategy document in 2014 and ultimately a blueprint for electricity sector reorganization released this year. Finally, agencies such as the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) and the National Energy Administration (NEA) have visited localities to emphasize the importance of the specific reform measures, and have established policy and implementing measures (e.g., to improve renewable energy utilization). At each step, the crucial link with central goals was preserved, ensuring that the drafting—typically not done by State Council staff—helped unambiguously establish priorities.

International and Domestic Policy Reinforcing Each Other

China’s Paris commitment expands this process by incorporating the three flavors of targets and helping shape future domestic actions. To increase non-fossil energy share, China promised to implement “green power dispatch” in a joint US-China announcement made prior to this year’s UN talks. And a CO2 peaking year of no later than 2030 will provide much-needed urgency to establishing rules and accountability for the upcoming national cap-and-trade system.

This policy process has clear implications for the importance of a robust pledge-and-review institution. China’s commitments—including a US$3.1 bn climate fund for developing countries—helped build momentum for Paris. The UN process can also help ratchet up and improve implementation of commitments by ensuring there are frequent reviews of existing pledges and continued opportunities for new ones. This will not only prompt central leaders to make bolder commitments but also provide ammunition for those seeking further domestic reforms to achieve them.

^1.Importantly, China’s calculation of primary energy deviates from international conventions. See Lewis et al 2015.

Michael Davidson is a PhD candidate in engineering systems at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and a research assistant in the Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change. Dr. Valerie Karplus, a ChinaFAQs expert, is an Assistant Professor in the Global Economics and Management Group at the MIT Sloan School of Management, and a Faculty Affiliate of the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change.

ChinaFAQs is a project facilitated by the World Resources Institute that provides insight into critical questions about Chinese policy and action on energy and climate change. The ChinaFAQs network is comprised of U.S.-based experts, including researchers at U.S. universities and government laboratories, independent scholars, and other professionals. 

Photo: China and U.S. pavilions at COP21. The U.S. and China announced their international commitments together in advance of the Paris talks. (Photo by Michael Davidson)