This year, carbon dioxide emissions in the world will fall by just over five percent according to the research collaboration Carbon Monitor, which has estimated how the pandemic has affected emissions in 2020. Something similar has never happened.

But in China, emissions remain at the 2019 level.

The reason is the Chinese industry.

There, emissions will increase by just over two percent.

According to Finnish emissions analyst Lauri Myllyvirta, the reason is a major investment in heavy industry, especially steel, after the summer.

- The trend in recent years was worrying, and the response to the pandemic shock was to return to heavy industry and construction.

This means that emissions during the third quarter reached record levels and that emissions increase faster than economic growth, says Myllyvirta at the Center for Research on Energy and Clean Air.

China's emissions in 2020 will be about the same as 2019. But China's industry will increase 2.2 percent.

Photo: SVT

"Insufficient"

Climate Action Tracker also calls China's climate policy "completely inadequate", despite doubled investments in digitization and electric cars.

The recovery package of approximately SEK 5,000 billion is "not climate-friendly", says CAT.

But the official picture is that there is a green recovery.

"China sees the restart after the pandemic as an opportunity to develop a green economy, and the measures taken are in line with green growth with low emissions," said Xinyu Dou, a emissions researcher at Tsinghua University in Beijing who contributed to the statistics.

Harder to turn

In September, China promised that emissions would begin to turn down before 2030, to be down to zero by 2060. It was a promise that was seen as a very hopeful signal because China emits the most in the whole world.

But the continued investments in coal-fired power plants and in traditional chimney industries this year make the goals more difficult to achieve, despite China's large investments in green energy, according to Myllyvirta.

- We expect a swing to 2030, but unfortunately the trends now for emissions and energy investments are worrying.

So there is a lot of work left to do, he says.