UN Doubts China Will Overtake US on Carbon by 2009

The International Energy Agency (IEA) has warned that China’s emissions of greenhouse gases could top the global list before 2010 if it does not change the way it fuels its double-digit annual economic growth.

But Khalid Malik, head of the UN delegation in China, said that later data led him to expect that China would not take the top place so quickly.
“The more recent figures are more optimistic,” Malik told journalists on the sidelines of a conference to launch a new emissions reduction investment scheme that includes a Beijing-based carbon trading exchange.

Malik declined to provide alternative figures, but the United Nations is working with the Chinese government on an assessment of its emissions, the UN’s Energy and Environment head in China, Kishan Khoday, told Reuters.

On a per-person basis China’s emissions are far lower than those of the United States and other industrialised nations, but its inefficient factories and booming demand for power, which largely comes from coal-fired plants, is pushing them up fast.

Planet Ark