President Obama's climate agreement already paying off, as China announces cap on coal use by 2020

[kpete]

President Obama's bold international diplomacy is paying big dividends:

The Chinese government announced Wednesday it would cap coal use by 2020. The Chinese State Council, or cabinet, said the peak would be 4.2 billion tonnes, a one-sixth increase over current consumption.

This is a staggering reversal of Chinese energy policy, which for two decades has been centered around building a coal plant or more a week. Now they’ll be building the equivalent in carbon-free power every week for decades, while the construction rate of new coal plants decelerates like a crash-test dummy.

The 2020 coal peak utterly refutes the GOP claim that China’s recent climate pledge “requires the Chinese to do nothing at all for 16 years.” Indeed, independent analyses make clear a 2020 coal peak announcement was the inevitable outcome of China’s game-changing climate deal deal with the U.S. last week, where China agreed to peak its total carbon pollution emissions in 2030 — or earlier.


http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/11/19/3593567/china-climate-target-peak-coal-2020/http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/11/19/1345954/-Climate-agreement-with-China-already-paying-off-as-China-announces-cap-on-coal-use-by-2020

[badtoworse]

1. Talk is cheap. I'm waiting to see how many coal plants they actually retire

[DeadEyeDyck]

4. have to agree

[Peacetrain]

2. This is huge.. they have this giant fossil fuel network

that they have to move and change.. I mean the fact that they have signed on to move forward.. is huge.. and if I remember correctly from a few years ago..they have already stepped up wind generators..2012 or 13..

[badtoworse]

3. They already emit 25% of the world's CO2 and their cap starts in 2020?

I don't see anything to get excited about. Their environmental record is appalling and it's one of the reasons they can produce stuff cheap. State of the art emission controls cost a lot of money and they are just now starting to mandate technology that we've been required to use for decades. That gave them a big advantage producing things that are energy intensive to make.

We should have put pressure on them to clean up their act decades ago.

[Cali_Democrat]

6. What kind of "pressure" should we have put on them?

Wouldn't it have looked a bit strange if we "pressure them to clean up their act" when the US Senate failed to ratify the Kyoto Protocol?

Wouldn't that be hypocritical of us?

[badtoworse]

7. Tariffs that were higher than the economic advantage their lack environmental protection gave them.

ETA: CO2 emissions aren't the half of it. I'm talking about NOx, SOx, VOC's, CO, particulates, mercury and other air toxics that come out of a coal plant with no emission controls. We've been controlling those things for a long time; they're just starting to.

[MattSh]

5. So the Chinese had nothing to do with this agreement?

All credit to Obama? Seriously?

The Chinese are agreeing to this because they see the problem pollution is causing in their country and are acting on it. Does Obama have to be given credit for every good event that occurs on this planet?



The article doesn't even mention Obama until the 16th paragraph. Obviously the authors of this article didn't think Obama's role was all that great.