| 英文摘要: | Faced with serious air pollution, China is aggressively reshaping its energy system, building on recent progress with renewables and on available supplies of gas. This should help contain global warming and provide new impetus to climate change negotiations. Over the past decade China accounted for over two-thirds of the growth in global CO2 emissions from energy use. In 2012, its emissions far surpassed those of other major countries and regions1 (Fig. 1). This reflects rapid economic growth in a massive country whose energy system remains largely based on fossil fuels, despite strong progress in renewable energy. This emissions growth has long spelt danger for the global climate. A gradual process to halt the rise in China's emissions by 2030 will alone add over 10% to the already high global level of CO2 emissions from energy use in 2012. China's response to the air pollution crisis suggests that its government is taking action that will bring emissions under control much more abruptly than previously evisaged. Such a rapid process of emissions control could improve prospects of holding global warming to less than 2°C and have important implications for both climate modelling and international climate negotiations.
We test whether these abrupt changes are achievable by examining one illustrative scenario through 2020, largely based on the DRC targets but with an earlier shift to natural gas (Table 1 and Fig. 2). This scenario involves a slower growth rate in energy use, a fall in the coal and oil shares in total energy use to 60% and 13% respectively by 2020, and a rise in the renewables and gas shares to 15% and 12% by 2020 respectively. Figure 2a shows that the absolute level of combined coal and oil use peaks by 2020, while Fig. 2b illustrates the abrupt nature of the shift in the structure of energy use. Table 1 also shows a projection of this path to 2030, based on the DRC indications.
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