MIT Launches Program to Track How China Deals With Carbon Emissions

Buildings shrouded in heavy smog in the coastal city of Yantai, east China's Shandong Province.
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Like many in the Western world, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has noticed that China is on track to become the world’s largest carbon emitter per person by 2017 and that its carbon emissions may be increasing at a rate faster than researchers anticipated, despite the fact that the country anticipates being able to meet its pledge to cut total carbon emissions by 5 percent by 2020.

But beyond just watching and hoping that China will boost its renewable energy programs at a fast enough rate to make a dent in that carbon footprint, MIT is launching a whole new, five-year-long program designed to “analyze the impact of existing and proposed energy and climate policies in China on technology, energy use, the environment and economic welfare by applying — and, where necessary, developing — both quantitative and qualitative analysis tools.”

The China Energy and Climate Project (CECP) was announced by the university on Wednesday. It’s a collaboration with Tsinghua University in Beijing, China and is being lead by recent MIT PhD grad Valerie Karplus.

“We are building a strong trans-Pacific research team that brings expertise in economics, engineering and public policy to this exciting new project,” Karplus said in a release. “Both sides are eager to get started, to learn from each other, and to produce rigorous analysis on important policy questions.”

Details about the program remain forthcoming, but MIT notes that the research program will follow three basic stages: A “study” phase, in which researchers look at the decision-making of energy policy by firms and households, a an “analysis” phase, where they will consider the various technological advances that have been proposed to reduce China’s carbon footprint, including clean energy and electric vehicles, and a more broad “evaluation” phase, which will examine the policies proposed at the governmental and corporate levels.

Eni, ICF International and Shell Oil are sponsoring the research, which will be presented at an annual meeting in Beijing.

China is the largest green energy investor in the world: Public and private investment totaled between $48 billion and $51.4 billion in the Chinese green energy industry in 2010, compared to $34 billion in the U.S. But China is also still the country with the worst air pollution in the world, with ultra-fine particles from cars and coal-burning plants accounting for over half of the particulate matter in the air in the industrial north (prompting stricter monitoring standards).

Plus, the U.S. Energy Information Agency recently released a report projecting that China’s energy demand will increase to 68 times over that of the U.S. by 2035.

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