For starters I don’t think ignoring the fact that China is building enough coal factories to power supply the whole of Britain can be so easily swept aside with talk of renewable progress in other areas, especially when you look at the poor quality of the solar projects that have been built.

After all, much of China’s green revolution is just that: talk. But rather than argue I’ll just share RAN RAN’s article below. Talk is cheap, especially when it’s state sponsored propaganda.

You also cannot take any one strategy for climate mitigation in isolation — earth doesn’t care about the politics only the quantities.

I would also suggest Yale’s piece here:

https://e360.yale.edu/features/despite-pledges-to-cut-emissi...

Ok, on to RAN’s piece:

The Mystery of China’s Glorious Green Dreams

BY RAN RAN

In a decentralized system, managing pollution has become less important than managing blame.
The world’s ability to limit atmospheric warming from greenhouse gases depends very much on China’s will and ability to control the carbon emitted by its growing economy. Currently the country is responsible for about 27% of global carbon emissions—more than anywhere else—and it will likely drive half of the growth in the world’s carbon emissions between now and 2030. And carbon-driven warming isn’t China’s only environmental problem. Air pollution alone kills more than 1.5 million people every year.

Since 2012, China’s leadership has often spoken of a “China Dream” that connects domestic environmental actions to global leadership on climate change and national revival. President Xi Jinping has repeatedly stressed that China’s effort to address climate change is not because others have asked for it, but is instead self-motivated. Xi often speaks of green policies in glowing terms, such as “moving toward a new era of ecological civilization and the construction of a beautiful China are the most important elements to realizing the China Dream of a glorious revival of the Chinese nation.”

The world’s ability to limit atmospheric warming from greenhouse gases depends very much on China’s will and ability to control the carbon emitted by its growing economy.
Leaders in China’s central government show a great awareness of climate change issues and have devoted significant resources to comprehensive climate policies and environmental laws, while trying to lead the creation of a global climate change regime. The government’s 13th Five Year Plan, covering 2016-2020, built on previous plans to set stricter environmental and energy targets. However, it’s becoming increasingly clear that many of these climate change policies have produced little effect, and some showcase projects appear to have failed, including the low-carbon-city pilot project and northern China’s rural coal-to-gas heating projects—both of which have become very controversial.

Within China, the gap between lofty green political rhetoric and reality is often explained by a phrase from the Yuan dynasty: “Heaven is high and the emperor is far away.” This analysis sees the major obstacle to China’s climate governance as local governments and officials who turn blind eyes to polluters in their jurisdictions, ignoring policies from higher up.

From this point of view, the reason Beijing’s climate change policies are ineffective is because local officials oppose the central government’s policies or refuse to implement them properly. But this is simplistic and illogical, in my opinion. Furthermore, understanding and addressing the true roots of the problem could provide a pathway to bringing implementation closer to the promise of greening China’s dream.

In fact, between Beijing’s soaring climate change agenda and its lackluster implementation lies a political paradox, and understanding it requires delving into the institutional constraints embedded in China’s climate and environmental politics at the local and national level. To start, it is useful to explore two such institutional constraints—political incentive and blame management—and the ways they defy expectations. Examining the nuances of these constraints will both explain why China’s environmental ambitions have failed to trickle down to local levels, and why local officials seem to be competent at carrying through on other polices but not the green ones.

The officials who implement national policies at the local level are party members, known as cadres, who can be considered both rational and ambitious. One of their major goals is to maximize their own political and administrative power, seeking promotion to higher positions as quickly as possible. In a democratic system, ambitious officials do this by courting voters, who continue to elect them to higher offices. In China’s system, where local cadres are competitively selected and appointed by the Communist Party, job promotion could be an effective political incentive to motivate local government officials to fully implement environmental policies.

Within China, the gap between lofty green political rhetoric and reality is often explained by a phrase from the Yuan dynasty: “Heaven is high and the emperor is far away.”
But a closer look at the promotion system reveals why this does not occur. The major institutional mechanism for rewarding local officials is the Cadre Performance Evaluation System (CPES), administered and run by the central government. The CPES conveys information about which national policies should receive priority—detailing which are quantifiable “hard targets.” Successfully implementing a hard target is likely to help advance an official’s career, whereas failure to meet the targets could effectively end an official’s career. Accordingly, local officials value positive CPES evaluations, and so they are more likely to implement clear and quantifiable hard targets rather than vague “soft targets.”

One reason why local government officials haven’t readily adopted climate change and environmental goals is that they became hard targets regulated by the CPES only in 2011. China’s 12th Five Year Plan, released in March 2011, addressed growing environmental and energy concerns by setting binding targets in seven major areas: energy intensity, carbon intensity, percentage of renewable fuels used in the primary energy mix, emissions of major pollutants such as sulfur dioxide, forest coverage, amount of water consumed per unit of value-added industrial output, and farmland reserves. This plan was widely perceived as an ambitious blueprint for a Chinese green revolution.

One might assume that making environmental and energy goals into hard targets would encourage cadres to implement them. However, in practice, the process by which targets are set and evaluated is imprecise and often creates internal competition and conflict with other hard targets. Generally speaking, local government officials are under the impression that meeting environmental and energy targets is likely to conflict with fulfilling other hard targets regulated by the CPES, which include increasing local revenue growth; hitting goals for production of goods and services; and even restricting the number of public protests, called “mass incidents.” Though they are supposed to meet all these targets, local governments actually prioritize among competing and conflicting mandates. This is especially true because meeting environmental targets is time consuming and often requires longer term investments than other nonenvironmental ones.

When it’s impossible to meet a target through investment and hard work, local governments feel compelled to meet the target by other means—often statistical data manipulation. Such fudging has a long history in China, perhaps reaching its peak during the Great Leap Forward in 1950s, when local governments gave glowing accounts of productivity as the country slipped into famine. If local cadres are faced with too many hard targets that they cannot meet, they may manipulate the statistical data by overreporting achievements, underreporting failures, or using different statistical methods. As a local environmental official I interviewed put it: “Meeting targets is like playing a numbers game. It’s impossible to meet all the binding targets, but still we have to meet those targets by whatever measures—which means we have to produce fake data.” Another explained: “It won’t be very hard to meet those targets once you know how to play the numbers game with the central government.” The temptation for cadres to fake data is also magnified by the fact that the central government has no effective institutional mechanism for double-checking the data.

Before concluding that cheating local officials are to blame for China’s shaky environmental progress, it is necessary to ask whether the central government is aware of widespread manipulation of the data. But a review of public official documents of the central government makes it clear that policy-makers in Beijing are familiar with the problem. Therefore, the larger issue is that the behavior of local governments is legitimized by a system where they can choose whichever method of measurement will best help them meet the requirements of hard environmental and energy targets.

Continued…

https://issues.org/mystery-of-chinas-glorious-green-dreams/