2024 年 9 月 16 日
如果中国停止拯救世界，会发生什么？
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/16/opinion/china-solar-climate.html
David Wallace-Wells 专栏，纽约时报，2024 年 9 月 16 日
在气候领域，曾经看似不可想象的事情现在可能正在发生。初步数据显示，虽然全球碳排放量持续上升，但中国的排放量可能已经达到峰值——这个长期的气候恶棍在整个地球之前就扭转了碳排放的局面。
这样的预测并不完全可靠，但中国已经彻底改写了全球绿色转型的故事。您可能熟悉这个故事的大致内容：得益于太阳能、风能和电池技术成本数十年来的惊人下降、新一轮的气候倡导浪潮以及政策支持的大幅增加，各种绿色能源技术的推出正呈现出惊人的指数上升曲线，每年都让传统行业分析师的谨慎预测成为笑柄。
然而，尽管这通常被誉为全球成功，但有一个国家主导了最近的进步。当你看看中国以外的世界时，那些令人瞠目结舌的全球曲线变得相当平坦——绿色能源仍在朝着正确的方向发展，但速度要慢得多。
以太阳能为例，它目前主导着全球绿色转型，给世界带来了美好的故事。2023 年，包括中国在内的世界安装了 425 千兆瓦的新太阳能发电；不包括中国的世界只安装了 162 千兆瓦。中国占了 263 千兆瓦；美国仅占 33 个。就在 2019 年，中国新增太阳能装机量约占全球新增装机量的四分之一；去年，中国新增装机量比世界其他国家总和高出 62%。在这五年里，中国新增装机量增长了八倍多；没有中国的世界甚至没有翻一番。
如果把中国从这些数字中剔除，这些数字看起来就没那么令人印象深刻了：2019 年安装了 90 千兆瓦，2020 年安装了 93 千兆瓦，2021 年安装了 100 千兆瓦，2022 年安装了 133 千兆瓦，2023 年安装了 162 千兆瓦。中国以外的地区也取得了进展——2021 年至 2023 年期间新增装机量增长了 62%。但在中国，增幅达到了 317%。
这种模式不仅限于太阳能。根据最近的一项估计，今年全球新建的大型太阳能和风能发电厂中，近三分之二在中国，中国部署的绿色能源规模是世界任何其他国家的八倍多。七国集团（美国、加拿大、法国、德国、意大利、日本和英国）加起来，2023 年的新增装机量仅为中国的四分之一。2023 年，中国新增风电装机容量为 74 千兆瓦；世界其他国家新增装机容量为 43 千兆瓦，美国仅为 6 千兆瓦。2023 年，中国售出 810 万辆电动汽车，而世界其他地区售出 560 万辆，美国售出 140 万辆。
可以肯定的是，其他地方也有令人鼓舞的故事。 （例如，在 2024 年的前六个月，欧洲从风能和太阳能中产生的电力超过了从化石燃料中产生的电力，而南非的屋顶太阳能在短短一年多的时间里增长了 349%。）但在世界其他地区脱碳的程度上，中国也在帮助推动这些转型。 2022 年，全球生产的太阳能晶圆和太阳能电池中约有 90% 来自中国——从某种程度上来说，这是世界其他地区准备安装的数量的两倍多。去年，全球 60% 以上的风力涡轮机是在中国制造的，全球 60% 的电动汽车销量来自中国。 2004 年，美国在全球太阳能制造业中的份额为 13%，但到 2023 年，这一份额已降至 1% 以下。中国的份额现在为 80%；而之前只有 1%。
就在五年前，西方气候外交官们抱怨说，如果中国国家主席习近平不配合，即使是富裕国家最神奇的脱碳计划也将毫无价值。中国是全球近三分之一的碳排放国。即使在今天，你也会听到名义上具有气候意识的人哀叹，气候变暖是一个全球性问题，而国内解决方案却很有限。他们认为，当地成本和全球收益的不匹配将打消不良或不情愿的气候行动者的积极性，有时他们还认为，这些动态表明我们也应该放慢步伐。
事实上，竞争逻辑现在正好相反。从某些方面来看，我们的同行国家和欧洲的天然盟友在转型方面都比美国走得更远。而我们的主要地缘政治和地缘经济对手并没有放慢脱碳步伐，而是在某种程度上把世界其他国家甩在了后面。这并不意味着中国已经为我们解决了世界气候问题——甚至它自己的问题，考虑到
就其持续碳排放的规模而言——正如布雷特·克里斯托弗斯最近在《金融时报》上所言，“能源转型并非单一的，而是一系列形式、速度和范围各异的区域转型”。亚当·图兹写道：“谈论‘全球’时会让人产生混淆，而事实上，有一个国家主导着整个能源转型动态：中国。”
十年前，美国及其盟友在如何鼓励中国（当时和现在都是世界上最大的排放国）加入我们的脱碳竞赛这一战略问题上投入了大量智力和外交精力。如今，美国政策制定者正在对绿色技术征收关税，以保护美国的清洁能源产业——这表明，从价格点来看，我们已经输掉了这场竞赛，此外，从部署速度来看，我们也输了。
中国对绿色科技的大规模投资既是对房地产泡沫后疲软经济的战略刺激，也是对清洁能源对 21 世纪繁荣和力量重要性的一次帝国级赌注。类似的逻辑也指导着其他地方的绿色投资，包括美国，美国的《通胀削减法案》被称为“世界上有史以来最大的清洁能源技术投资”。但如果这是一场竞赛，中国将占据绝对优势。
当然，如果用排放量来衡量，就会得到一幅略有不同的图景。如今，中国产生的碳几乎是美国的三倍，而美国是世界第二大气候污染国，而且在当今对地球未来气候造成的破坏方面，中国比世界其他国家高出更多。但在某些方面，这让中国的绿色繁荣更加令人印象深刻：作为世界历史上碳排放最多的经济体，在经济增长放缓、未达到全球“高收入”水平的时期，中国将其未来的巨大赌注押在了新兴能源技术上——并且远远超过了它对自身转型速度做出的全球承诺。例如，今年，中国提前整整六年实现了 2030 年可再生能源总量目标。在美国，我们似乎更关注人工智能。
你可以通过几种方式来衡量这一惊人的影响。可以说，电力是全球转型的货币，根据 Ember 的数据，去年全球电力需求的净增长总额为 627 太瓦时；中国自己就增加了 606 太瓦时。（一太瓦等于一万亿瓦。）
或者你可以看看国际能源署所说的“避免排放”——这是衡量新可再生能源影响的一种方式。中国新增太阳能发电量每年可减少 619 兆吨碳排放，是美国的六倍。
当然，这些增长在一定程度上反映了中国传统能源结构有多么肮脏，因为替代煤炭比替代天然气减少的排放量更多。然而，这种对比令人震惊。根据国际能源署的数据，中国新建的风力发电厂“避免”了 487 兆吨的排放，而世界其他地区的所有风力发电仅减少了 343 兆吨的碳排放。在中国，电动汽车避免了 22 兆吨的排放，超过了美国（15 兆吨）、欧盟（14 兆吨）、英国（3 兆吨），是世界其他地区新建电动汽车（7 兆吨）的三倍。核能领域的竞争稍微公平一些，但即便如此，中国减少的排放量（74 兆吨）也比韩国（20 兆吨）、阿联酋（15 兆吨）、欧盟（9 兆吨）和世界其他国家（44 兆吨）要多。
你也可以看看他们正在建设的简单规模。中国用于太阳能发电厂的土地是美国的两倍多。
所有这些加起来意味着什么？将中国置于任何有关绿色转型的故事或分析的无可争议的中心意味着什么？
这个问题很大，可能和地缘政治一样大，和全球未来的可能性一样广阔。但在短期内，至少有两个基本点对我来说很突出。
首先，目前，能源转型在很大程度上是一个中国项目。世界各地都在取得进展，但中国与其他国家之间的差距比人们普遍承认的要大得多，也更令人生畏，如果你把中国放在一边，全球形势看起来就不那么乐观了——从某种程度上来说，这正是美国通过发动绿色技术贸易战试图做的事情。
这些关税的大部分争论都涉及中国补贴和“产能过剩”的挑战——以及美国及其盟友可能会采取什么措施，让我们能够与绿色经济进行适当竞争，绿色经济目前生产的太阳能电池板数量是世界需求的两倍，而电动汽车公司正在接管世界虽然大多数国家都在亏损。但这种不平衡的另一个方面可能更令人担忧，至少对我们这些担心脱碳速度的人来说是这样：中国可能会退缩，减少对绿色产业的支持，就像它故意给自己的房地产泡沫放气一样，这在某种程度上使全球绿色转型的引擎空转，让我们其他人陷入困境。
What Happens if China Stops Trying to Save the World?
Forecasts like these are not perfectly reliable, but already China has completely rewritten the global green transition story. You may be familiar with the broad strokes of that story: that thanks to several decades of mind-boggling declines in the cost of solar, wind and battery technology, a new wave of climate advocacy and dramatically more policy support, the rollout of various green energy technologies is tracing an astonishing exponential curve upward, each year making a mockery of cautious projections from legacy industry analysts.
But while this is often hailed as a global success, one country has dominated recent progress. When you look at the world outside of China, those eye-popping global curves flatten out considerably — green energy is still moving in the right direction, but much more slowly.
Consider solar power, which is presently dominating the global green transition and giving the world its feel-good story. In 2023, the world including China installed 425 gigawatts of new solar power; the world without China installed only 162 gigawatts. China accounted for 263 gigawatts; the United States accounted for just 33. As recently as 2019, China was installing about one-quarter of global solar capacity additions; last year, it managed 62 percent more than the rest of the world combined. Over those same five years, China grew its amount of new added capacity more than eight times over; the world without China didn’t even double its rate.
Take China out of these figures and the numbers look much less impressive: 90 gigawatts installed in 2019, 93 in 2020, 100 in 2021, 133 in 2022 and 162 in 2023. There has been progress outside of China — a 62 percent increase in new capacity between 2021 and 2023. But in China the increase was 317 percent.
The pattern extends beyond solar. According to one recent estimate, nearly two-thirds of all big solar and wind plants being built globally this year are in China, which is deploying green energy at more than eight times the scale of any other country in the world. Together, all the Group of 7 powers — the United States, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and Britain — managed barely one-quarter as many new installations in 2023 as did China. In 2023, China installed 74 gigawatts of new wind capacity; the rest of the world installed 43 gigawatts, and the United States just 6. In 2023, 8.1 million electric vehicles were sold in China, compared to 5.6 million everywhere else in the world and 1.4 million in America.
There are encouraging stories elsewhere, to be sure. (In the first six months of 2024, Europe produced more electricity from wind and solar than from fossil fuels, for instance, and rooftop solar increased by 349 percent in South Africa in just over a year.) But to the extent that the rest of the world is decarbonizing, China is helping power those transitions, too. In 2022, roughly 90 percent of the solar wafers and solar cells produced in the world were Chinese — by some measures more than twice as many as the rest of the world was even ready to install. Last year, more than 60 percent of the world’s wind turbines were manufactured in China and 60 percent of the world’s E.V. sales came from China. In 2004, the American share of global solar manufacturing was 13 percent, but by 2023, it had fallen below 1 percent. China’s share is now 80 percent; it had been just 1 percent.
Just five years ago, it was commonplace to hear Western climate diplomats complain that even the most miraculous decarbonization in the wealthy world would be worth little if the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, whose country single-handedly produces nearly a third of all emissions, didn’t play ball. Even today, you hear nominally climate-conscious people lament the fact that warming is a worldwide problem with domestic solutions, postulating that the mismatch of local costs and global benefits will disincentivize bad or reluctant climate actors, and sometimes arguing that these dynamics suggest we should slow our roll, as well.
In fact, the competitive logic is now something like the opposite. By some measures, our peer countries and natural allies in Europe are all considerably farther along in their transitions than the United States. And our major geopolitical and geoeconomic rival is not slow-walking its decarbonization, but somewhat leaving the rest of the world in the dust. That doesn’t mean China has solved the world’s climate problem for us — or even its own, given the scale of its ongoing carbon emissions — just that “there is not one single energy transition but a series of regional transitions of widely varying form, pace and scope,” as Brett Christophers argued recently in The Financial Times. “There is an obfuscation involved in talking about ‘the global,’” Adam Tooze has written, “when, in fact, there is one country that dominates the entire dynamic of the energy transition: China.”
A decade ago, an awful lot of intellectual and diplomatic energy was spent on the strategic question of how the United States and its allies might encourage China, then as now the world’s biggest emitter, to join us in the race to decarbonize. Today, U.S. policymakers are throwing up green-tech tariffs to protect American clean-energy industries — a sign that, measuring by price point, we are already losing that race, in addition to losing it as measured by rate of deployment.
China’s massive investments in green tech are both strategic stimulus for a flagging economy in the aftermath of a real-estate bubble and an imperial-scale bet on the importance of clean energy to prosperity and power in the 21st century. A similar logic guides green investment elsewhere, including in the United States, where the Inflation Reduction Act has been called “the world’s largest-ever investment in clean energy technologies.” But if this is a race, China has a commanding lead.
To measure instead by emissions, of course, yields a somewhat different picture. China today produces almost three times as much carbon as the United States, which is the world’s second-worst climate polluter, and towers even more dramatically above the other countries of the world in any tally of present-day damage to the future climate of the planet. But in certain ways this makes China’s green boom even more impressive: The most carbon-hungry economy in world history, during a period of slowing growth short of global “high-income” status, is wagering an enormous amount of its future on nascent energy technologies— and racing well ahead of the global promises it has made about the speed of its own transition. This year, for instance, China hit its 2030 target for total renewable energy six full years early. In the United States, we seem perhaps more focused on artificial intelligence.
You can measure the staggering impact in several ways. Electricity is the currency of the global transition, so to speak, and, last year, the total net growth in global electricity demand was 627 terawatt hours, according to Ember; China on its own added 606 terawatt hours. (A terawatt is one trillion watts.)
Or you can look at what the International Energy Agency calls “avoided emissions” — one way of measuring the impact of new renewables. New solar additions in China accounted for 619 megatons of annual avoided emissions, six times as much as the United States.
These gains partly reflect how dirty China’s legacy energy mix is, of course, since replacing coal reduces more emissions than replacing gas. Nevertheless the contrasts are eye-popping. New wind capacity built in China “avoided” 487 megatons of emissions, according to the I.E.A., while all the wind power elsewhere in the world only cut carbon by 343 megatons. In China, electric cars averted 22 megatons of emissions, more than in the United States (15 megatons), the European Union (14 megatons), Britain (3 megatons) and three times as much as new E.V.s in the rest of the world (7 megatons). Nuclear is a slightly more even race, but even there China avoided more emissions (74 megatons) than South Korea (20 megatons), the United Arab Emirates (15 megatons), the European Union (9 megatons) and the rest of the world (44 megatons).
You can also look at the simple scale of what they are building. China has devoted more than twice as much land to solar plants as the United States has.
What does all this add up to? What does it mean to place China at the incontrovertible center of any story about, or analysis of, the green transition?
The question is an enormous one, perhaps as large as geopolitics and as capacious as the scope of possible global futures. But in the short run, at least, two basic points stand out to me.
The first is that the energy transition is, at present, to a large degree, a Chinese project. There is progress being made around the world, but the gap between China and everybody else is much larger and more intimidating than is widely acknowledged, and the global story looks much less optimistic once you set China aside — which is, in some ways, precisely what America is trying to do by engaging in a green-tech trade war.
Much of the argument for those tariffs has concerned the challenge of Chinese subsidy and “overcapacity” — and what the United States and its allies might do, if anything, to enable us to properly compete with a green economy producing today twice as many solar panels as the world has demand for, as well as an E.V. company taking over the world while mostly posting losses. But another aspect of the imbalance is perhaps more worrying, at least for those of us concerned about the pace of decarbonization: that China might back off, reducing its support for green industry in much the way that it purposefully deflated its own real-estate bubble, somewhat idling the engine of the global green transition and leaving the rest of us in the lurch.
