Environment China

Today, we are talking about the institutions and international politics of China's climate policy with Professor Miranda Schreurs, Chair of Environmental and Climate Policy at the Bavarian School of Public Policy, and vice dean of Technical University of Munich's school of governance, where she has served since 2016. Prior to this she was Director of the Environmental Policy Research Center and Professor of Comparative Politics at the Freie Universität Berlin. She has served as member of the German Advisory Council on the Environment and as vice chair of the European Environment and Sustainable Development Advisory Councils since 2008. She was also a tenured associate Professor in the Department of Government and Politics, University of Maryland. Schreurs' work focuses on comparative environmental politics and policy in Europe, the US, and East Asia. She was born and raised in the United States and has also lived for extended periods in Japan and Germany and briefly in the Netherlands. She has a PhD from the University of Michigan and an MA and BA from the University of Washington. Here are the key questions we discuss: 01:41 - Has Europe been positively surprised by China carbon developments in the last year? 03:00 - Would you say that the mutual cooperation and agreement on climate outweighs disputes on trade policy in the energy field? 07:25 - Does Europe now view China as a climate leader? 10:05 - How does Europe expect China to react to the carbon border adjustment tax? 13:00 - Regarding Prof Schreurs' past work on Multi-level Perspectives on climate governance, does she see climate policy in China becoming more centralized? 15:30 - The role of provincial and local pilots in climate-related policy 17:10 - The extent to which provinces may drag their feet on climate policy 19:30 - Incentives for local officials on environmental performance 20:30 - How did the concept of carbon neutrality come to be recognized as viable for China? 25:00 - The role of the carbon market in China compared to other policies Important links: https://www.professoren.tum.de/en/schreurs-miranda Miranda Schreurs, "Multi-level Climate Governance in China," 2017: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/316246858_Multi-level_Climate_Governance_in_China

Today, we're talking about a type of clean energy that doesn't get much attention these days: concentrating solar power. For the past decade, solar photovoltaic or PV panels have dominated the world solar market, and China has installed over 200 GW of PV, currently adding a whopping 40 GW of PV every year. Distinct from PV, concentrating solar power, or CSP, takes a bunch of different forms: long troughs of mirrors that heat a central element such as a pipe filled with water or molten salt, power towers surrounded by fields of mirrors called heliostats, and a couple others. Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) technologies use mirrors to track the sun and reflect and concentrate its light onto a 'receiver', where it is converted into heat. This heat can be used to produce electrical power with a conventional steam turbine and generator, or as industrial process heat. That's a big advantage over PV, which just produces electricity directly, but doesn't create high heat. CSP also has great potential for on-site energy storage, which is becoming more important as solar grows. We're talking today with two long-time friends of BEN: Alina Gilmanova, of China's Key Laboratory of Solar Thermal Energy and Photovoltaic Systems, Institute for Electrical Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences; and Jorrit Gosens, Research Fellow on Energy Transitions at the Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University. (Also noted for the China Energy Portal, https://chinenergyportal.org.) Alina and Jorrit recently published a paper (with Johan Lilliestam) on CSP in China entitled: "Windows of opportunity for catching up in formative clean-tech sectors and the rise of China in concentrated solar power," in Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions. The link to the journal article is: https://authors.elsevier.com/a/1ckYn7sbuJDG-k For those without subscription, a freely available pre-print version of the paper can be found here: https://ccep.crawford.anu.edu.au/sites/default/files/publication/ccep_crawford_anu_edu_au/2021-04/wp_2104.pdf Guide to the discussion: 2:13 - Alina talks about the history of CSP in various countries and China 5:23 - Alina describes the relative degree of CSP's technology maturity 7:27 - Alina discusses the dominant design for CSP today and the move in China towards tower technology 9:45 - Jorrit discusses the factors that make different technologies more or less susceptible to technology catch-up, especially now that it's recognized that developing countries like China don't need to wait until a technology reaches maturity 12:40 - Jorrit discusses how CSP compares on those factors that enable catch-up 14:27 - Jorrit discusses how they decided to write this study and why CSP is special in terms of catch-up 16:30 - Jorrit describes the concept of a window-of-opportunity for catch-up, and how CSP fits into this idea 18:11 - Anders, Jorrit, and Alina discuss whether the connection to coal boiler technology motivated Chinese companies to enter the CSP field 22:11 - Anders asks if the bankruptcy of all the competing players inherently led to "catch-up" 24:30 - Alina discusses the role of energy storage in China CSP; references paper on economics of storage using CSP vs PV+battery: "Making the Sun Shine at Night," 2021, at https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15567249.2020.1843565. 26:20 - Alina discusses the present economics of CSP in China and whether there is a path forward 27:09 - Alina discusses China's go-abroad strategy for CSP 29:53 - Jorrit explains his view of whether CSP offers lessons for other developing countries considering industrial policy to foster new industries in clean energy Another useful resource: Open CSP data base with all CSP projects worldwide (https://csp.guru/), also at: Johan Lilliestam, Richard Thonig, Chuncheng Zang, & Alina Gilmanova (2021). CSP.guru (Version 2021-01-01) [Data set]. Zenodo. http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4613099

A lot has happened in China climate and energy policy just in the weeks since the release of the outline of the national 14th Five-Year Plan. Provinces, state-owned energy giants, cities, and companies are announcing carbon neutral plans, ministries are issuing new policies, and there are new discussions around accelerating the carbon market to include more sectors and add auctions. Yet without the bright, blinking lights of the words Five-Year Plan, these important developments are often missing from English-language reporting. We will go through them one by one, and also address larger questions, like whether China now sees itself as a leader on climate policy, and the trend towards administrative management versus markets in energy and carbon. Today, we're talking again with Yan Qin, a power and carbon analyst at Refinitiv in Norway. She has extensive experiences in energy market analysis and quantitative modelling. Her work focuses on the short-term outlook for power and carbon trading, supply-demand forecasting, and energy policy insights, mainly for clients at utilities and energy companies. Yan holds a Masters in Economics from the University of Oslo. For further reading: Carbon Brief: https://www.carbonbrief.org/qa-what-does-chinas-14th-five-year-plan-mean-for-climate-change Oxford Institute for Energy Studies: https://www.oxfordenergy.org/publications/key-issues-for-chinas-14th-five-year-plan/ China Dialogue: https://chinadialogue.net/en/energy/the-14th-five-year-plan-sends-mixed-message-about-chinas-near-term-climate-trajectory/ Vox: https://www.vox.com/22313871/china-energy-climate-change-five-year-plan-wind-solar-coal-oil-gas

Today's podcast looks in detail at the market's expectations for carbon pricing in China, based on the results of the China Carbon Pricing Survey 2020, at http://www.chinacarbon.info/. The survey has been around for long enough to provide a view of how market expectations have changed over time and what types of companies are seeing the most changes. We get into a lot of discussion that goes beyond the actual findings in the report, like how asset values are likely to change, what it means that so few respondents view the ETS as having modified investment practices, and how the results would compare if the same survey was done in Europe. Our guests: Huw Slater is the Lead Climate Specialist at ICF's Beijing office and supports the EU-China ETS Platform. He is the lead author of the China Carbon Pricing Survey report. Dimitri DeBoer leads the china office of Client Earth, a European NGO focused on environmental law, which works with the Ministry of Ecology and Environment. He is also special advisor to the CCICED, the China Council for International Cooperation on Environment and Development. Wang Shu is lead management consultant at ICF. He is a former director in the Climate Change Department in the Chinese National Development and Reform Commission and has over ten years of experience working on climate change and clean energy, especially related to regional and national carbon markets. Special note: Due to technical difficulties, we had to re-record parts of the podcast. As a result some (but not all!) portions refer to "this year" as 2020 and "next year" as 2021. The miracle of time travel! If something seems confusing, just mentally modify to the year that seems correct, given that we knew then and still know that trading will begin in 2021, not "next year" as is stated in several spots!

Two weeks into the Biden administration, and we've arrived at the fourth and final episode of our short series talking about US-China cooperation on energy and climate. Today, we host special guest Lili Pike, past organizer and host of the BEN podcast and now journalist at Vox.com, where she has written about U.S. China cooperation. She was previously at China Dialogue in Beijing. Lili and Anders review the recent comments from John Kerry and Zhao Lijian about US-China climate negotiations, discuss technologies where the two countries lead, and talk about whether the Biden administration's turn towards multilateralism might help or hinder climate discussions with China. We also touch on green finance, the Green Climate Fund, and the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).

We've arrived at Episode 3 of our series talking about the Biden administration and what it means for US-China cooperation on energy and climate, with a special emphasis today on subnational cooperation, with Dr Fan Dai. We hone in on how the countries could work together on developing pathways for low-carbon energy transitions and potentially coordinate on areas where the focus is now on scale up, and no longer on the now discarded concept of "burden sharing." Dr Fan Dai is the Director of the California-China Climate Institute at University of California, Berkeley. has played a significant role leading California's collaboration with China on climate, energy and environment. She was appointed by Governor Edmund G. Brown Jr as Special Advisor on China. Under Brown, Dr. Dai chaired the state's China Interagency Working Group, and acted as the state's liaison on its critical economic and environmental initiatives on China. Previously, Dr. Dai served as senior advisor at California Environmental Protection Agency. Dai is a graduate of Berkeley Law, University of California, and holds a doctoral degree on Environmental Policy and Economics from State University of New York.

Welcome to Part 2 of our podcast series about the Biden administration and what it means for US-China cooperation on energy and climate. On this episode, we have four energy and climate experts from the U.S. and China. Li Xiang of Peking University, Alvin Lin of the Natural resources defense council, Li Shuo of Greenpeace East Asia, and Ma Li of the US-China Energy Cooperation Program. We did the interviews on the same day, but separately and using different software, so the sound is slightly different at the transitions. Bios: Li Xiang is an adjunct research professor at Peking University Energy Institute, and previously served at the Rocky Mountain Institute and prior to that at the International Energy Agency and China Electric Power Planning and Engineering Institute. He has a PhD and bachelor's of engineering from Tsinghua. Alvin Lin is China climate and energy policy director in the Natural Resource Defense Council's Beijing office. His areas of expertise include the environmental impacts of coal and shale gas development, energy efficiency technologies, nuclear power safety regulations, and air pollution law and policy. Prior to joining NRDC, Lin worked as a litigator and a judicial clerk in New York City. He holds a bachelor's degree from Yale University, a master's from the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and a JD from New York University. Li Shuo is the Senior Climate & Energy Policy Officer for Greenpeace East Asia. He oversees Greenpeace's work on air pollution, water, and renewable energy. Internationally, he coordinates the organization's engagement with the United Nations climate negotiation (UNFCCC). Li Shuo studied International Law and US-China relations at Nanjing University and the Hopkins Nanjing Center. Ma Li is the executive director of US-China Energy Cooperation Program (ECP), a private sector-led non-profit public-private-partnership platform created in 2009 as a result of an official dialogue between then US president Obama and Chinese President Hu Jintao in 2009. Li holds a master degree in Public Service Administration and a BA degree of International Business from the DePaul University. Stay tuned next week for Part 3!

Today we are beginning a new series of podcasts on the hot topic of US-China energy and climate cooperation, starting with Professor Joanna Lewis of Georgetown University. Dr Joanna Lewis is Provost's Distinguished Associate Professor of Energy and Environment and Director of the Science, Technology and International Affairs Program (STIA) at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service. She is also a faculty affiliate in the China Energy Group at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Lewis leads Georgetown's US-China Climate Research Dialogue and US-China Energy and Climate Working Group. Lewis holds a Master's and Ph.D. in Energy and Resources from the University of California, Berkeley and a Bachelor's degree in Environmental Science and Policy from Duke University. In this episode, we touch on: Lessons from past U.S.-China climate and energy cooperation, a topic Prof Lewis addressed in a recent paper here: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/766400; Which areas of climate cooperation the Biden administration is likely to focus on; Whether Trump tariffs on solar and other clean energy technologies will be removed; Whether the U.S. can still cooperate with China on technology innovation; And whether the two countries still believe they can learn from each other on climate policy.

Methane is responsible for an astonishing one-quarter of today's global warming, and that makes it an urgent issue, right alongside CO2. But most analysts focus mainly on CO2 and the energy mix, not other greenhouse gases, and those who do look at methane mainly focus on the U.S. or other major gas producing countries. So today, we're going to talk about a couple of recent EDF reports and scientific articles about methane related policies in China. Our guest today is Zhang Jianyu. Dr Zhang is Chief Representative of the China Office of the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), and he is also Vice President and member of the Executive Team at EDF. He helped found the China program of EDF and helped it become the first international NGO registered with the Ministry of Ecology and Environment in 2017. Dr Zhang has contributed to the establishment of China's Carbon Trading System, and has authored numerous peer-reviewed articles, as well as columns, and book chapters. Methane, like CO2, is a greenhouse gas. Pure methane has the chemical formula CH4. Most comes from oil and gas wells or from coal mines. It's more efficient and less CO2 intensive than coal or oil, but direct methane emissions have a far larger global warming effect per molecule than CO2, with a global warming effect over 80 times higher per molecule (when measured over a 20-year period). About 25% of today's global warming is caused by methane emissions. The IEA estimates that the world's oil and gas industry can feasibly cut methane emissions by 75%, and of that, 2/3 would be at no cost. China has committed to achieve carbon neutrality by 2060 and to peak carbon emissions before 2030. Currently (as of this recording on Dec. 18, 2020), it is unclear if that includes all greenhouse gases or just CO2. For further reading: Ramon Alvarez et al., "Assessment of methane emissions from the U.S. oil and gas supply chain," Science, July 2018: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/361/6398/186.full?ijkey=42lcrJ/vdyyZA&keytype=ref&siteid=sci. Scot M. Miller at al., "China's coal mine methane regulations have not curbed growing emissions," Nature Communications, February 2019, at https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-07891-7. "Measuring Methane," EDF, 2020: https://www.edf.org/sites/default/files/EDF-Methane-Science-Brochure.pdf. "Methane: A Global Challenge, A Global Opportunity," EDF, 2020: https://www.edf.org/sites/default/files/methane-a_global_challenge_a_global_opportunity.pdf. "China Signals Methane is a New Climate Focus for Curtailing Energy Emissions," EDF, June 2019, https://www.edf.org/media/china-signals-methane-new-climate-focus-curtailing-energy-emissions. "Challenge, opportunity as China begins to tackle fossil fuel methane emissions," EDF, March 2019, at http://blogs.edf.org/energyexchange/2019/03/08/challenge-opportunity-as-china-begins-to-tackle-fossil-fuel-methane-emissions/.

Today, we're going to be discussing a new report, Green Development Guidance for BRI Projects Baseline Study, published by the BRI International Green Development Coalition (BRIGC) and backed by the Ministry of Ecology and Environment. The BRIGC is a joint Chinese and international coalition, and in December last year the coalition began work on the current study, which formulates a classification framework and positive and negative lists for BRI investments. With the team leaders Mr. Erik Solheim, Special Advisor World Resources Institute (WRI) and Ms. Zhou Guomei, Executive Director-General, Foreign Environmental Cooperation Center, Ministry of Ecology and Environment (MEE), the report was written by a team of Chinese and international scholars and experts. Our first guest is Dr. Christoph Nedopil Wang, the Founding Director of the Green Belt and Road Initiative Center and a Senior Research Fellow at the International Institute of Green Finance (IIGF) of the Central University of Finance and Economics (CUFE) in Beijing, China. Christoph is a member of the Belt and Road Initiative Green Coalition (BRIGC) of the Chinese Ministry of Ecology and Environment. Christoph holds a master of engineering from the Technical University Berlin, a master of public administration from Harvard Kennedy School, as well as a PhD in Economics. Our second guest is Wang Ye, Research Analyst in WRI Finance Center. She works to coordinate the work and engage in researches related to promoting sustainability in the financial system in China. Ye holds an Erasmus Mundus Master in Sustainable Territorial Development from the consortium of University of Padova, K.U. Leuven, University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne (France) and Dom Bosco Catholic University (Brazil), specializing in Applied Economics. She also holds dual Bachelor degrees in Journalism and International Finance from Beijing Foreign Studies University in China. For further reading: "Green Development Guidance for BRI Projects Baseline Study Report," BRI International Green Development Coalition, December 2020, at http://en.brigc.net/Reports/Report_Download/202012/P020201201717466274510.pdf. Ma Tianjie, "Advisors propose new system to regulate China's overseas investments," China Dialogue, December 4, 2020, at https://chinadialogue.net/en/climate/advisors-propose-new-system-to-regulate-chinas-overseas-investments/. Lihuan Zhou, Sean Gilbert, Ye Wang, Miquel Muñoz Cabré and Kevin P. Gallagher, "Moving the Green Belt and Road Initiative: From Words to Actions," World Resources Institute, November 2018, at https://www.wri.org/publication/moving-green-belt-and-road-initiative-from-words-to-actions