Quote of the Week - The global battle against climate change has passed a historic turning point with China’s huge coal burning finally having peaked.

The global battle against climate change has passed a historic turning point with China’s huge coal burning finally having peaked, according to senior economists.

They say the moment may well be a significant milestone in the course of the Anthropocene, the current era in which human activity dominates the world’s environment.

China is the world’s biggest polluter and more than tripled its coal burning from 2000 to 2013, emitting billions of tonnes of climate-warming carbon dioxide.  But its coal consumption peaked in 2014, much earlier than expected, and then began falling.

The economists argue in a new paper on Monday that this can now be seen as permanent trend, not a blip, due to major shifts in the Chinese economy and a crackdown on pollution.

“I think it is a real turning point,” said Lord Nicholas Stern, an eminent climate economist at the London School of Economics, who wrote the analysis with colleagues from Tsinghua University in Beijing.  “I think historians really will see [the coal peak of] 2014 as a very important event in the history of the climate and economy of the world.”

China's coal peak hailed as turning point in climate change battle by Damian Carrington, Guardian, July 25, 2016