Official Chinese data, reported by the New York Times on Wednesday after being quietly released earlier this year, suggests China has been burning up to 17 percent more coal each year than previously disclosed by the government.
The revelation – which may mean China has emitted close to a billion additional tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year – could complicate the fight against global warming ahead of the United Nations climate change conference in Paris, which begins on Nov. 30.
In 2012 China consumed 600m more tons of coal – or more than 70 percent of the United States’ annual total – than previously disclosed, according to the revised data.
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The report came as Chinese prime minister, Li Keqiang, said his country had a duty to humanity to bring its emissions under control.
Speaking during a visit to China by the French president, François Hollande, Li said: “For a great many years, we consumed too much energy and resources to achieve our development, and this model has since become unsustainable.”
Li Shuo, the senior climate and energy policy officer for Greenpeace East Asia, said the revised data suggested a gap between official statistics and what was happening on the ground.
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However, Li, who said environment experts and policymakers had been aware of the higher numbers since the start of this year, cautioned against an overly bleak reading of the figures.
China is the world’s largest consumer of coal, with Chinese miners digging up 3.87 billion tons last year alone. But Li said an economic slowdown and Beijing’s bold attempts to reduce its dependency on the fossil fuel meant consumption was now falling.
“China’s coal consumption probably won’t get as high as what we saw for the past decade,” he said. “At [the very] least we are seeing a plateauing period now, which is quite significant.”
Read more at China Underreporting Coal Consumption, Data Says
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