For many years, wealthy places like the United States and Europe have had the biggest historical responsibility for global warming and have been tasked with taking the lead in stopping it.
China’s astonishing rise is upending that dynamic.
Over the past three decades, China has built more than 1,000 coal-fired power plants as its economy has grown more than 40-fold. The country has become by far the largest annual emitter of greenhouse gases in the world.
The United States has still pumped more total planet-warming pollution into the atmosphere since the 19th century, in part because the country has been burning coal, oil and natural gas for longer. But China is quickly catching up.
Last year, China for the first time passed Europe as the second-largest historical emitter, according to an analysis published on Tuesday by Carbon Brief, a climate research site.
When humans burn fossil fuels or cut down forests, the resulting carbon dioxide typically lingers in the atmosphere for hundreds of years, heating the planet all the while. That’s why historical emissions are often used as a gauge of responsibility for global warming.
China, for its part, has promised that its emissions will peak this decade and then start falling. The country is installing more wind turbines and solar panels than all other nations combined and leads the world in electric vehicle sales. But even with China’s shift to low-carbon energy, the Carbon Brief analysis found, the nation’s historical emissions are projected to approach those of the United States in the coming years.
China’s historical responsibility for climate change has become a major point of contention in global climate politics.
This week, diplomats and leaders from nearly 200 countries have gathered at the United Nations climate summit in Baku, Azerbaijan, to discuss howto raise the trillions of dollars that vulnerable nations will need to shift to clean energy and to cope with droughts, heat waves, floods and other hazards of a warming planet. One big question is where that money should come from.
Traditionally, the answer has been that wealthy, industrialized countries — like the United States, Japan, Canada, Australia and most of western Europe — should pay up.
Under a United Nations framework originally written in 1992, these developed countrieshave been called upon to provide financial aid. Countries like China, India and Saudi Arabia, as well as every nation in Africa, are classified as developing by that framework, and have not been required to chip in.
Today, however, many wealthy nations say this distinction no longer makes sense. Leaders from both the United States and European Union have called on China to contribute more climate finance to poorer countries as part of a final deal at Baku.
