China pledges, signs climate accord but how green is its promise?

China has signed the Paris climate accord to cut greenhouse gas emissions, reduce coal use, and invest in renewable energy but the communist nation has had no tradition, ideological or operational, of sensitivity to environment.

At the opening of the Chinese Communist Party Congress just a couple of days back, the country's all-powerful President Xi Jinping promised that China would "thoroughly advance the energy revolution." On the sidelines of the very ongoing Congress, his Vice Minister for Environment Zhai Qing claimed that China was now "the world's largest producer and consumer of renewable energy and new energy vehicles."

Zhai informed China's installed capacity of wind, solar, water and biomass also ranked first in the world. The proportion of coal in energy consumption had dropped from 72.4 per cent in 2005 to 56 per cent in 2021 when the proportion of non-fossil fuel energy consumption reached 16.6 per cent.

China is, however, hardly serious about taking its energy revolution abroad. Observers say China has, in the recent years made tall promises on the theme. It has signed the Paris climate accord to cut greenhouse gas emissions, reduce coal use, and invest in renewable energy. China has pledged to achieve carbon neutrality by 2060. But communist China has had no tradition, ideological or operational, of sensitivity to environment.

Chinese traders depleted Benin and Gambia of rosewood and have now moved onto Nigeria. In 2013, Chinese President Xi launched the Belt and Road Initiative to build a land-based "Silk Road Economic Belt" and a sea-based "21st Century Maritime Silk Road". As part of the BRI, in Sierra Leone, China has bought 250 acres of protected rainforest and beach land. It plans to have a fish-meal factory. The fish-meal factory generates toxic waste harmful to wildlife.

China is using the BRI 'to perpetuate the use of coal and other fossil fuels'. Most of China's energy financing goes toward non-renewable sources. Between 2014 and 2017, 91 per cent of energy-sector loans made by six major Chinese banks to BRI countries were for fossil fuel projects. In 2018, 40 per cent of energy sector lending went to coal projects. In 2016, China was involved in 240 coal plants in BRI countries.

The observers say China still produces more than a quarter of the world's annual greenhouse gas emissions. Chinese-backed hydropower projects, along the Mekong River - which spans Cambodia, Lao PDR, Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam - are causing river flow changes and blocking fish migration.

In Sumatra, Indonesia, China's hydropower construction company, Sinohydro, is building a huge hydropower dam in the Batang Toru rainforest. The dam threatens to destroy the existence of the rarest ape in the world, the Tapanuli orangutan.

(Jagdish N. Singh is a senior journalist based in New Delhi. He is also Senior Distinguished Fellow at the Gatestone Institute, New York)

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