Reduce carbon press the fast forward button
Climate change is one of the crises facing mankind.
As the largest developing country, China implements a national strategy to actively respond to climate change, incorporates carbon intensity decline as a binding indicator into its national economic and social development plans, and has adopted adjustments to industrial structure, optimizing energy structure, energy conservation, energy efficiency, and promoting market mechanism construction. , Actively increase forest carbon sinks and a series of policy measures, through arduous efforts, to achieve the 2020 climate action goal ahead of schedule.
This year, China has made a new commitment to the international community and pressed the fast forward button in the process of carbon reduction.
"High carbon" will exit the market
Due to the substantial increase in carbon dioxide content produced by human activities, the greenhouse effect has intensified, and the earth's temperature has gradually increased.
Therefore, the world has begun to cooperate in response to climate change and strive to control greenhouse gas emissions.
China has taken an active role in this global action. This year, it pledged to the international community to achieve the peak of carbon emissions by 2030 and achieve carbon neutrality by 2060.
One of the largest developing countries dared to stand up and promise to reach the peak of carbon emissions ahead of schedule and be carbon neutral, which undoubtedly gave a boost to the global climate governance process.
“As the global response to climate change lacks momentum and progress is slow, being able to clearly and clearly put forward China’s climate change goals and the content of its nationally determined contributions is of great significance to the global implementation of the goals of the Paris Agreement, and is of great significance to China. The significance is even greater.” Pan Jiahua, a member of the Economics Department of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, pointed out.
It is understood that following China’s proposal to achieve carbon neutrality by 2060, the EU has increased its climate goal from a 55% reduction in carbon emissions compared with 1990 to 60% reduction. Japan, South Korea, the United Kingdom and other countries have also followed Put forward the goal of achieving carbon neutrality in the country by 2050.
The new emission reduction targets will also have a profound impact on domestic economic development.
Experts believe that to achieve the peak and even the goal of carbon neutrality, carbon dioxide emissions must be significantly reduced, which will force the continuous adjustment and optimization of the energy structure and industrial structure, and drive the strong growth of the green industry, and eventually high carbon will withdraw from the stage of history.
"People's perception of high-carbon energy, industries, products, and consumption will change because they have no future and will eventually exit the stage of history." Pan Jiahua analyzed that with clear expectations, investors will know Carbon investment is subject to carbon rigidity, and the market is not optimistic. Gradually, there will be no market for high-carbon.
High carbon is contained and investment in low-carbon technological innovation will increase.
Eventually, it will be able to steadily advance the low-carbon process in all directions, including changes in consumer behavior.
The effect of the carbon market appears
In order to further promote energy conservation and emission reduction, a low-cost and high-efficiency carbon trading mechanism-the carbon market was born.
In accordance with the requirements of the document on nationally determined contributions to climate change submitted by the Chinese government to the secretariat of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, China will establish a relatively complete carbon emission trading mechanism by 2020.
In October 2011, the National Development and Reform Commission approved 7 provinces and cities including Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin, Chongqing, Hubei, Guangdong and Shenzhen to carry out carbon trading pilot work; in 2013, China’s pilot carbon market began trading; from 2017, the national carbon The construction of the emission trading system was launched, 31 provinces, autonomous regions and municipalities and the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps were gradually included in the scope of national carbon emissions trading, and the carbon market was gradually operating stably.
More and more companies have increased their awareness of carbon reduction by participating in carbon market transactions, and energy saving and emission reduction has become a conscious behavior of companies.
"In the past, energy conservation and emission reduction goals were passed from the central government to the local governments level by level, but now they have become a conscious choice of enterprises, because carbon emission management has been directly linked to the company's profit, investment, and cash flow." Shenzhen Emissions Trading Said Ge Xing'an, president of the firm.
As the earliest pilot city, Shanghai's carbon trading work has become increasingly mature in recent years.
At present, the Shanghai Environmental Energy Exchange has gradually improved the framework of the carbon emission trading system.
As of October 30, 2020, all companies in Shanghai included in the management of carbon emission quotas have completed the payment of their 2019 carbon emission quotas.
So far, Shanghai's carbon emission companies have achieved 100% compliance for 7 consecutive years.
In terms of emission reduction effects, in 2019, the carbon emissions of carbon trading companies in the electric power, petrochemical, and steel industries in Shanghai decreased by 8.7%, 12.6%, and 14%, respectively.
At present, the total amount and intensity of carbon emissions within the pilot scope of the national carbon market maintain a double downward trend.
As of August this year, the carbon market in pilot provinces, autonomous regions, and municipalities such as Beijing has covered more than 20 industries including steel, electric power, and cement, with close to 3,000 companies, with a cumulative transaction volume of more than 400 million tons and a cumulative transaction volume of more than 9 billion yuan.
A total of 2,837 key emission units, 1082 non-compliance agencies and 11169 natural persons participated in the pilot carbon market.
In 2020, China has grown into the world's second largest carbon market in terms of quota trading volume!
Carbon reduction is in full swing
One of the keys to achieving carbon neutrality is to reduce the use of coal. Since the "Eleventh Five-Year Plan", China has established binding targets for energy conservation and carbon reduction in every five-year plan, which is divided into various provinces, autonomous regions and municipalities, and strengthened at all levels. Government goal accountability system.
Starting from the "Twelfth Five-Year Plan" period, China has taken the systematic and restrictive goal of reducing the intensity of carbon emissions per unit of GDP as a starting point to promote low-carbon development.
In terms of improving energy efficiency, China adopted "ultra-supercritical" power generation technology earlier, and only 270 grams of coal is required to generate 1 kWh of electricity; energy consumption in high-energy-consuming industries such as steel and cement has dropped significantly... Only in 2016-2019, China The effect of saving energy and improving energy efficiency is equivalent to reducing carbon dioxide emissions by 1.4 billion tons.
In terms of improving the energy structure, as of the end of 2019, China's carbon intensity was about 48.1% lower than in 2005, and non-fossil energy accounted for 15.3% of primary energy consumption.
At the same time, increase the use of zero-carbon renewable energy.
The number of patents, investment, installed capacity and power generation in the field of renewable energy in China have been ranked first in the world for many consecutive years, and the installed scale of wind power and photovoltaics accounted for more than 30% of the world.
At the same time, China has implemented large-scale afforestation and forest carbon sinks have greatly increased.
In 2018, the forest area and forest stock volume increased by 45.09 million hectares and 5.104 billion cubic meters respectively over 2005, becoming the country with the largest increase in global forest resources during the same period.
All sectors of society are also gradually changing their energy consumption concepts, and various low-carbon and environmentally friendly products are becoming more and more popular.
Since 2010, China's new energy vehicles have doubled their annual growth rate.
Shenzhen has been at the forefront of carbon reduction actions in various places.
Shenzhen is a major economic development city in China. Carbon emissions have only increased by 4 million tons in the past five years. This is mainly because Shenzhen has optimized its industrial structure and transformed into high value-added industries. Unit output growth has gradually decoupled from carbon emissions.
According to Professor Tang Jie of the School of Economics and Management of Harbin Institute of Technology (Shenzhen), the construction of the Pingshan New Energy Vehicle Base is one of the effective measures taken by Shenzhen to reduce emissions from fuel vehicles.
Tens of thousands of buses and taxis in Shenzhen have been replaced. The replacement effect in these years is equivalent to the equivalent of 10,000 buses and taxis replacing 600,000 private cars to produce carbon emissions equivalent; Shenzhen eliminated tens of thousands of low-end enterprises and encouraged the development of high surcharges Value and new energy industry; Shenzhen is also the first to establish an ecological county in the country, the land within the regulations cannot be developed, and the continuous restoration of damaged vegetation and the construction of ecological landscape forests play an important role in reducing air and carbon emissions.
In order to achieve the peak goal, the Ministry of Ecology and Environment stated that the "14th Five-Year Plan" will have a series of hard measures, including not only the setting of indicators, but also better use of market means, comprehensive use of technology, fiscal, taxation, environmental protection and other policies to better Promote high-quality development.