Chinese Energy Intensity Goals

Xinhua, the Chinese official news agency released the following item yesterday (I deleted points that are not relevant to this blog DS):February 28, 2011 Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao during an on-line chat with the public Sunday answered questions concerning economic growth targets, housing prices, migrant workers, currency exchange rate reform, health care insurance, and other matters.The

Inflation in China

As a follow up to my post on consumer price inflation in the US here are trends in the last couple of years in China:Credit: CEIC.Whereas the US chart showed the levels of price indices this chart shows the rate of inflation. Inflation is China is currently at 4.9%. The fastest rising category is food, which has a much bigger budget share than the in the US, as is typical of developing economies.

China Meets Goal of Reducing Energy Intensity by 20% from 2005 to 2010

China claims that the goal of reducing energy intensity by 20% over 5 years has been met. The article should state BTW that energy intensity was cut 14.4% "by" 2009 not "in" 2009. A lot of us were skeptical that China could achieve this target. Two things helped achieve the target:1. Revisions to GDP that resulted in the growth rate of GDP in the earlier years of the period being revised up.2.

Nighttime Image of Beijing and Tianjin from the International Space Station

Another cool (?) image from NASA. Taken by an astronaut aboard the space station, hence the oblique angle.

Institutions

Some interesting observations on social structure in China and Europe and Elinor Ostrom's Nobel Prize Lecture.

Getting Around the Great Firewall

As you can see, because Blogger is blocked in China, Stochastic Trend gets no visits from there:I am sure some people visit using a VPN, but I've come up with an alternative solution. Once a month I could post the source code of my blog to my website. I don't know if the images which are still all hosted by Google will be visible or not and all the links on the side that go back to Blogger will

Marginal Abatement Cost Curve for China

The chart plots the carbon price in US Dollars (market exchange rate) against Gt of Co2 abated for China using the results from seven of the EMF-22 models. This is not really a cost curve as it includes data for different time periods and model scenarios. I've been struggling to model this data over the last 10 days or so on and off. But this is actually the first time I've plotted the data like

What is Business as Usual for China and India?

My paper with Frank Jotzo in Energy Policy argued that while India's goal of cutting emissions intensity by 25% between 2005 and 2020 was likely to be similar to the business as usual reduction in emissions, China's goal was much more ambitious. China aims to reduce emissions intensity by 40-45% over this time frame, while we estimated it would decline by 24% under business as usual.By contrast,

Generosity

Peter Martin reports on a generosity index. It combines data on charitable giving (which is highest in the US) with volunteering of time, and willingness to help strangers. In combination, Australia comes out top. It's worth also checking out some of the countries that come in with very low scores. One of these is China. We often here about a lack of trust in China and these numbers bear that out.

Gillard's Climate Initiative

The main feature of Gillard's climate policy announced today is to run a 150 person citizens' jury on the issue. Strangely most of the green activists quoted are against the idea but many of my colleagues in ecological economics would probably think this was a great idea in principle. Shuang's first reaction was though that: "it will be tough to handle 150 people".Gillard also said that under a

China Update

Yesterday, I attended the China Update at ANU. One of the benefits of attending is getting a copy of the book produced for the conference which I am looking through at the moment. Not all chapters were presented at the conference and not all conference papers are in the book.I was most interested in three topics discussed at the update and in the conference book: Calls from China-based

Jotzo and Stern Paper to be Published at Energy Policy

Our paper: How Ambitious are China and India's Emissions Intensity Targets? has been accepted for publication at Energy Policy.

Frank's Blogpost

Frank Jotzo has a blogpost about China's emissions intensity target.

Progress on China's 2005-2010 Energy Intensity Target

Stephen Howes provides an update on China's progress on its energy intensity goal. This goal was always very ambitious just like China's goal of reducing emissions intensity by 40-45% by 2020 is very ambitious. The modest progress made so far on the energy intensity goal does not bode well for China meeting the emissions intensity goal either, though they could surprise us. This was one of my

Coverage in The Australian

The Australian had a story today covering our research:

How Ambitious are China and India's Emissions Intensity Targets?

Following Frank's presentation we have http://econpapers.repec.org/paper/eeneenhrr/1051.htm">a new working paper up with the same title as this blogpost. This is an updated version of the papers I presented at the AARES conference and the EERH Hub Workshop in Adelaide in February.The revised model includes variables for capital and human capital inputs. This has important effects on the estimated

AARES 2010 Paper

Greetings from Adelaide! My first time in South Australia. I just put up a draft paper for our presentations at the AARES meeting here in Adelaide. Papers were meant to be submitted by January 15th to get on the "Conference CD". We ignored that deadline but didn't completely forget about producing a paper :) I'm presenting today, Tuesday, on this topic as part of the annual Environmental

China’s Emissions Intensity Target: BAU, Feasible, or Infeasible?

I've put up some slides that I'm planning on using at a forum with some people from the Chinese government here at ANU this week that are a preview of where I'm heading for my presentations at the Environmental Economics Research Hub Workshop and AARES Conference in Adelaide next week. There isn't much text on the slides. The basic story is that I use a model of energy intensity to extract the

Convergence of Energy Efficiency

I've been making more progress in my Environmental Economics Research Hub Project. I still don't have final results, but I am close. The above chart shows the estimated underlying energy efficiency, controlling for the structure of the economy etc. for five countries. I don't quite believe that the US is more efficient than Switzerland but at least the two developing economies are less efficient

There are More Chinese Students in Australia than in the U.S.

It is hard to believe that there are 50% more Chinese students in Australia than in the U.S. which has 14 times the population of Australia. Digging around on the web I found plenty of other articles from different sources corroborating the 130,000 number.