Chinese statistics are often a fragile thing. The Onion had this story back in 2014:
So last week we read in the WSJ:
China Cooks the Carbon Emissions Books
https://www.wsj.com/opinion/china-carbon-emissions-statistics-lauri-myllyvirta-fdf66609?mod=article_inline
At United Nations climate conferences in Copenhagen in 2009 and Paris in 2015, Beijing vowed sizeable reductions in the amount of carbon China emits per dollar of gross domestic product, or carbon intensity. Subsequent national planning documents reiterated this goal.
So, old-style accounting implies China’s emission grew by 1,430 megatonnes in the last five years. But the new carbon-intensity figures imply only 690 megatons of CO₂ growth, creating a 730 megatonnes from CO2 gap.
A footnote in China’s latest statistical communique offers a brief description of carbon intensity as relating to the CO2 emissions from “energy activities and industrial production”.
This indicates that the carbon-intensity calculation now includes industrial process emissions and excludes non-energy uses of fossil fuels, shown by the “new scope” in the figure above.
DB2