China's De-Carbonization Policies,and Their Implications For The Future Of Global Climate Change

In recent years,China has implemented a number of policies with the purpose of cutting the country's emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses.This thesis has three main objectives.The first is to empirically test the efficacy of these policies,the second is to use the results of that test to estimate the most probable future emissions scenario for China,and the third is to explore the implications of this scenario for the future of global climate-change policy as a whole.This thesis is divided into five chapters.The first chapter serves as an introduction to the topic,and also makes a number of key arguments that establish the parameters of the debate.It outlines the scale of Chinese greenhouse gas emissions,arguing that the sheer size of the country's emissions gives it a key role in the context of global climate-change policy.It details the causes and composition of Chinese emissions.It gives a history of Chinese efforts to cut its carbon emissions,which includes a description of all the policies that are later subjected to econometric testing.Finally,chapter one provides a number of simplifying hypotheses about de-carbonization and global warming that are used for the remainder of the thesis.Chapter two gives a broad overview of the literature surrounding Chinese de-carbonization.It breaks expert analysis of this topic into three broad schools of thought:"the optimists,""the pessimists," and "the empiricists."The rest of the chapter is devoted to explaining what type of expert inhabits each school,what type of assumptions are inherent to each outlook,and what predictions each camp tends to make.The framework provided in chapter two establishes a range of emissions scenarios in which to place the analysis from the following two chapters.Chapter three comprises an empirical study of four Chinese de-carbonization policies:the carbon-trading pilots,the low-carbon cities and provinces initiative,the feed-in tariff for wind power generation,and the EV city/city-group pilots.The chapter begins by outlining a number of additional simplifying assumptions that are necessary to make the main thesis question empirically answerable.Thus the research question is temporarily rephrased as:"what effect have Chinese de-carbonization policies had on the rate of coal consumption?" The method used to answer this question is a difference-in-difference regression,which compares the change in coal consumption between 2009 and 2015 in provinces that implemented the de-carbonization policies against those which didn't.The study finds that the carbon-trading pilots and the feed-in-tariff had a statistically significant effect on the coal-consumption rate.The author then goes on to perform a number of tests to check the robustness of the results.Firstly,three different types of random effects regressions are performed(the main regression uses fixed results,)as well as another fixed-effects regression with different parameters.Then,the author drops several combinations of provinces from the regression in order to discern whether factors specific to those provinces have influenced the results.Third,the author performs the tests on coalconsumption within specific sectors of the economies of each province,namely:thermal power generation,heating,industry,transportation,total rural consumption,and total urban consumption.Fourth,the author performs the tests on the consumption of other fossil fuels,namely natural gas,total petroleum products,and gasoline.Fifth,the author measures the effect of de-carbonization policies on coal production.Finally,the author measures the effect of the policies on production of zero-emissions energy,namely hydropower,nuclear power,and wind power.The initial results generally hold throughout all of the robustness checks.However,the author finds that the high feedin-tariff has a paradoxical effect on wind power generation,leading him to drop the FIT results from his findings.Thus,the author concludes that only the carbon-trading pilots have an effect on coal consumption,and that the size of the effect is uncertain but probably not large.The final part of chapter three concerns various methodological defects of the research method.Specifically,the author concedes that his study is plagued by a biased sample and endogeneity problems,outlines what unavoidable problems with the data gave rise to them,and explains how these issues may be affecting the results.The author concludes by suggesting several directions for future research,which principally involve conducting a similar analysis using municipal-level coal-consumption data,and expanding the range of policies subject to testing.Chapter four comprises a case study of Germany's de-carbonization policies,which are collectively termed the Energiewende,and an attempt to discern what implications Germany's experience carries for China.The chapter begins by justifying the comparison between the two countries and outlining the policies contained within the Energiewende.The author then goes on to evaluate the results of the Energiewende,and explain how they apply to China.The author concludes that China is unlikely to make the same mistakes as Germany but that nonetheless the German experience demonstrates that comprehensive de-carbonization is too expensive and selfcontradictory to be implemented anywhere in the short and medium-term.For that reason,the author judges a radical tightening of Chinese de-carbonization policies to be unlikely.Chapter five ties the findings of chapters three and four back into the broader debate outlined in chapter two.The findings from those sections suggest broad agreement with the "pessimist"school,and the author borrows their forecasts to suggest an emissions reduction of about 25%(with,of course,a great deal of uncertainty,)as being the most likely de-carbonization path for China by the middle of the twentieth century.This finding(according to IPCC's climate change model,)would imply between two and four degrees of warming by 2100,depending on how other countries respond to a slow Chinese de-carbonization.From the current standpoint,this would be considered a failure of global climate change policy.The author ends the study by suggesting that rather than naming this a catastrophe and calling for ever less realistic emissions targets,policymakers should reorient climate change policy around a strategy of long-term subsidies for renewables and gridscale storage to stabilize emissions in the long-term,and in the short and medium term,adaptation to a certain amount of warming,which probably can no longer be prevented.