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A ‘Great Reversal’ in China? Coal continues to decline with enforcement of environmental laws

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2025

Hao Tan  and
John A. Mathews
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Two headline stories dominate discussion of China's energy trajectory right now. The first is that reports from three agencies all point to the continuing decline in use of coal in the first half of 2015, continuing a trajectory already notable in 2014. These are not declines in the rate of growth, but absolute declines in the amount of coal consumed in power generation as well as in energy-intensive industries like steel and cement production. This points to the possibility that coal consumption may be peaking much earlier than anticipated in official government statements – and so pointing to an early peaking of carbon emissions. If continued, this would be a ‘Great Reversal’ of China's recent dominant role in consumption of dirty fossil fuels and production of greenhouse gases.

Type
Research Article
Information
Asia-Pacific Journal , Volume 13 , Issue 34 , August 2015 , e1
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BYCreative Common License - NCCreative Common License - ND
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work.
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 2015

References

Notes

1 See news report for the measures.

2 See here (in Chinese)

3 See here (in Chinese)

4 See here (in Chinese)

5 See here.

6 See here (in Chinese)

7 See here. According to the China Electricity Council, electricity generation based on grid-connected solar accounted for 10.7 TW in 1H 2014

8 For plants with an electric generation capacity of 6GW or over

9 See here (in Chinese); and here (in Chinese)

10 See the discussion of these issues in the recent paper from Van Aken and Lewis (2015): Van Aken, T. and Lewis, O.A. 2015. The political economy of non-compliance in China: The case of industrial energy policy, Contemporary China, 24 (95): 798-822.

11 See here (in Chinese)

12 Zhang, B. & Cao, C. 2015. Four gaps in China's new environmental law. Nature, 517: 433-434.