Is China now the World's Climate Change Leader?

Today we’re taking a deep dive into one of the biggest paradoxes on the planet: China.

On one hand, you’ve got the crackdowns on free speech, brutal business practices, and a government that doesn’t exactly scream “freedom.” On the other? China’s leading the biggest clean energy transformation the world has ever seen — and it’s happening fast.

In this episode, we're breaking down how China’s trying to pivot from the world’s coal-chugging factory to a net-zero powerhouse by 2060. We’ll cover everything from massive reforestation efforts, to electrifying entire cities, to building “electricity highways” across the country.
 

It’s messy. It’s complicated. But it’s fascinating.
 

And no matter how you feel about China, what happens there will shape the future for all of us.

Transcript

Good morning, afternoon or evening, whatever it is wherever  you happen to find yourself today. 

No stories or examples to start the day, let’s just dive right in and talk about China. 

Typically when we think of China, it’s really hard not to think about the heavy stuff— the crackdowns on free speech, factories built on stolen ideas and technology, being absolutely brutal in markets. And honestly, there’s a lot of truth to all of this stuff. But here’s the crazy part: they’re also leading one of the biggest clean energy pushes the planet’s ever seen. It’s an unbelievably messy and complicated undertaking—but it matters far more than most of us can even begin to realize.”

Remember when everything had that Made in China tag on it? That model worked because they made things faster and cheaper than anybody else. But the catch? The industries that drove all of that, they ran on coal—and a heck of a lot of it.

I’m Dave and thank you so much for Joining me today on Running My Mouth Off about Climate Change. Today, as you may have guessed by now, We’re talking China, which I find to be a pretty interesting dichotomy of sorts.

In talking to a few people from china, I heard over and over again that Xi Jinping , and I hope that I’m pronouncing that somewhere near correctly, he’s an environmentalist at heart, a huge environmentalist, which is is kind of confusing to me given China’s historical track record on greenhouse gasses and pollution. 

And granted, the people with whom I’ve spoken is a pretty small sample size but, as early as 2017, based on what I saw, Xi Jinping has been on record as saying things like, “Take care of the earth, and it will take care of us.” Pretty interesting stuff. 

So they’ve been this manufacturing powerhouse who had this amazing competitive advantage of being able to build faster and cheaper than anybody else. Again though, there was a huge environmental cost associated with this, and you could see it in pictures of Beijing before the 2008 summer olympics, absolutely disgusting air quality. 

Now though? They are pivoting. And they’re pivoting hard. 

They’ve laid out some pretty ambitious goals that have them net zero by 2060, and their emissions are set to peak right around 2030, which, if you think about it, is only 5 years away. And I’ve read a few reports that say that they’re way, way ahead of that goal. Really impressive stuff, these goals are impressive and so far their performance seems to be even moreso. 

They’re doing in a number of ways, first from moving from that heavy industry that created all of that nasty air, to more of a services-and-tech based economy, like the US and France and a lot of other places.

Finance, healthcare, education, software—all of those sectors have a way smaller carbon footprints than do steel mills and cement plants.

Take Shenzhen, example. It used to be this kinda sleepy fishing town. And then it became this massive manufacturing hub that made pretty much anything that you can think of. 

Now though? It’s essentially become China’s Silicon Valley. 

Check out companies like BYD, for example. BYD used to be called Build Your Dreams and it was purchased and rebranded as BYD. And they used to make cell phone batteries. And now, they’ve become one of the largest EV manufacturers in the world. Their 2024 sales handily beat Tesla by about $10 billion US, and that’s billion with a “B”. Yeah—they’re beating Tesla.

And they’ve come up with this charging technology that gets you 250 miles of range, of driving range, with only a 5 minute charge, which is crazy when you consider that to change a Tesla to go that far, takes about 15 minutes. 

Not a Tesla owner so I can’t confirm that, that’s just what I’ve read.

So there’s a huge shift, this movement that’s happening right now in Chinese business, but it isn’t just happening on its own, it’s not like the businesses is leading the charge. 

Xi Jinping, again there’s the pronunciation that I freak out about again, and the government, they're kind of orchestrating all of this behind the scenes, maybe not so much behind, but they’re definitely the puppet master—and they’re offering incentives,  heavily investing in things like education, and straight-up shutting down polluting factories in a lot of areas. Bottom line, they’re making it really hard to be dirty and to be cheap, and they’re rewarding heavily those who go clean and, I’ll say, smart.

By the way, quality used to be something that was pretty suspect in Chinese goods? Based on my conversations and again, really small sample size so don’t take my word as Gospel but, it looks like the Chinese are becoming an incredibly proud people and, if there’s a problem with something that they’ve manufactured? There is a very strong desire to make it right. Again, hope it’s true, but there’s that sample size.

Of course, and kinda I feel like I’m racing through this pretty quickly, there’s a lot to cover here. There’s going to be winners and losers any time massive changes like that are made to an economy, and China is certainly no exception. A lot of older workers, meaning people who have been in the workforce for a while, they’re just going to have to re-skill — like any other technological advancement, it’s not so much that technology is getting rid of jobs as much as it is redefining those jobs. 

We’ve seen stuff like this happen quite a few times. Computers, for example, became a huge deal in the 1980’s and 90’s and there were so many people who were saying, “Computers are going to take all of our jobs!”. And then, and entire industry happened around computers, it actually added a lot jobs. Those jobs were very different in their scope and the public had to adjust to fill those jobs. But, the same thing is happening in AI right now. We’re hearing that same, “AI is gonna take all of our jobs!” Well, no, it’s not going to take the jobs, it’s just going to redefine those jobs. 

It’s very much like taking a person who details cars for a living as they’re coming off of an assembly line and then telling them, “you know what?  Now, you have to become an IT specialist.” This is gonna be something that’s gonna to be very, very hard for China to pull off but, looking at how committed they’ve become to education and re-education though? Well, suffice to say it’s going to be really interesting to watch and see how this all plays out.

But ya, the industry on the whole is, growing up, for lack of a better term. 

And then there’s the work that they’re doing in their energy sector. 

China’s energy system today is still kind of this coal-chugging machine. In fact, over half the world’s coal is burned right there in China. 

But they’re also leading the world in clean energy development. Things like Wind. Solar. Hydro. Nuclear. You name it, they’re building it, massively. In fact right now, about 80% of the world’s solar panels, come from China. That might not be too surprising but, in 2023, they invested over $130 billion, that’s billion, with a B, trying to figure out how to make these solar panels better and how to make them more efficient. 

The numbers on stuff like this are almost laughable. 

They’re also planning to add more than 4,500 gigawatts of wind and solar by 2060. By the way, the cost of that? A little bit over $12 trillion US. According to their plans, the bulk of their power generation by 2045 will come from solar.

They also have, as of April of 2024, 55 nuclear reactors that are up and running, and more on the way— and they’re building these things faster than anyone else on the planet. 

Nuclear power though, it’s one of those things that makes me pretty nervous. I’ve read that it’s safe but I see things like Chernobyl and Fukushima, and ya, it makes me, a little concerned. Everything that I’ve read though says that neither of these to plants had the kind of safety measures in place that are being installing now so, hopefully this push towards nuclear isn’t too bad of a thing? After all, I think that we’re going to see more and more of these things pop up globally? So ya, another thing that’s gonna be interesting to watch, and I hope that’s all it is, is interesting. 

Their power grid though, i.e., getting power from one place to the next,  Also seeing massive upgrades— they have these systems, and they call them, ”electricity highways" that move this clean power all over the place. 

In China, there’s a lot of sun up in the north and there’s a lot of wind in the west, and there are mega-cities in the east. So getting power from one place to the next, from that sunny north and windy west, to the east, that doesn’t have either, is kind of a major priority. 

Power grids on the whole, they’re tricky things, and yet again, it’s another one of those things that will be really interesting to see how they implement this, how they pull this off. 

But China’s goal in all of this, it’s not just to shut down coal plants. It’s to ramp up clean energy as fast as possible, while making coal cleaner as they’re waiting for these clean energy sources to become more available, more viable. 

In its executive plan, it calls for an 80% reduction of coal demand by 2060, so they’re still planning to keep it around to a degree, but they’re going to make it a lot cleaner. 

And honestly? This kinda makes sense to me. As a world, we’re not yet ready, from a technological standpoint, to go all in on clean energy, we’re just not positioned to do that yet. China though, they seem to be becoming a really good model for how to implement all of this stuff though.

Clean energy is fantastic, it’s great. But it’s not enough, just to make clean energy. China is being very intentional in figuring out how to use this clean energy, across the board.

Things like transportation, which is a huge polluter and emitter of greenhouse gasses. China is the biggest EV market in the world. I mentioned how BYD’s revenue is outpacing Tesla’s, now think about this: In China, they sell more EV’s, more electric vehicles, in a single month, than the US sells in an entire year. When I read that one, it kinda made me go, “whoa”. 

And it’s not just about the cars. Entire fleets of buses and delivery vehicles, mainly scooters, are all electric now. Again, Shenzhen for example, It’s a city of about 17 million people, and, for once, that’s million with an “m”,  they've already converted their entire bus fleet, and we’re talking about 16,000 buses, to all-electric. And that’s absolutely crazy.

They’re also electrifying buildings, factories, heating systems—basically anything that used to run on coal or gas is now electric or becoming electric. For example, some of these buildings, some of these huge monstrosities that we see in the skylines of cities like Beijing? They use huge heating and air conditioning systems. Now though, they’re installing heat pumps instead.…for really big buildings. Think about the scale of some of these projects, even just one.

And here’s where it really gets interesting: the more things they electrify, the more renewable energy systems they build. The more renewables they build, the cleaner electrification becomes. It becomes one of those positive feedback loops that we talked about last week, it just kinda builds on itself, this time in a very good way though, unlike what happens in nature.

They’re not going to hit zero in every sector, they get this. Some of these industries, like aviation, steel, agriculture—these things are just really hard to clean up.

So they’re doing reforestation on a massive scale, and this is one of those things that I absolutely love. Since the 1990s, they’ve planted over 35 billion trees, again that’s with the B and not the M. They’re also restoring wetlands and grasslands.

And I’ve seen what reforestation efforts look like in parts of Indonesia, and it’s not a small or certainly easy task by any stretch of the word. It typically takes about 10 years of work, of attention given to these forests, to properly restore them, but China, I mean they are just stepping to this challenge up big time. 

They’ve been conducting what is no doubt, the largest reforestation program in human history. Again, since the 1990s, there’s those 35 billion trees… They give these programs names like the "Great Green Wall" and the "Grain for Green" initiative, where they've converted marginal farmland, meaning, farmland that hasn’t been performing all that well, back into forests.

When we look at satellite images comparing parts of northern China, which is where the bulk of this reforestation is happening, from the 1990s to today, the differences are pretty amazing. Back in the 90’s, we’d see brown area after brown area. And now, we’re just seeing green, all over the place. And this has happened in just a few decades. Again, amazing dedication and effort on China’s part.

Beyond these reforestation efforts though, they've also been restoring wetlands and grasslands which can store massive amounts of carbon and methane. China actually has now, some of the world's largest wetland restoration projects underway in places like the Yellow River Delta, which is kind of in the northeastern portion of China?

But these natural solutions, these are fantastic solutions, and I fully applaud them for this, but they have limits. After all, you can only plant so many trees before you run out of suitable land to plant them on, right? So they’re also massively, and I seem to be saying that word today — massively. They’re investing hugely in carbon capture tech—pulling CO₂ out of smokestacks and even from the air, (and we’ll talk more about that in a minute). Some of it gets buried deep into the ground, and some of it gets reused. This type of technology, it’s in the very early stages, and it’s pricey, but they’re trying. We’ll see how it works, let’s see how effective they are in implementing this stuff.

They already have several carbon capture projects running, but in order to hit that goal of being net zero by 2060, they’re going to have to scale these carbon capture projects up, big time. And, by the way, we're talking about capturing hundreds of millions of tons of CO₂ annually. 

And then there’s the issue of finding places to store it permanently and safely underground, and making sure that stuff doesn’t leak while it’s on it’s way to being underground… it’s not a small task by anyone’s standards.

And there’s a lot of controversy over carbon capture — it’s again expensive and there can be a lot of leakage — but I’m really hoping that this is one of those things that we get a lot better at as time and technology move forward, and, thinking about it, that’s usually the case, that’s usually how things work — the more we develop technology, the more it moves forward, right? So, fingers crossed…. 

Then there's the other carbon capture thing - machines that are pulling CO₂ straight out of the ambient air, and this is typically called Direct Air Capture. This technology already exists and it's incredibly expensive. In some recent tests that I read about, the carbon that they’re able to collect from the air, and we’re talking about China here, is 99% pure carbon, meaning that this process captures a lot of carbon, and not a lot else. 

They're looking at ways to use the captured carbon as well - things like injecting it into concrete or converting it into fuels, chemicals, bioplastics is a big thing… the whole technology is still very new but they seem to be pretty busy trying to figure out what to do with it. You have all of this carbon, might as well make use of it, right?  

One last thing is that I’ll mention Obviously, people in Asia eat a lot of rice. And growing rice produces a lot of methane. 

China has been working with Sweden on this, and they’ve developed a breed of rice, ya, ok, it’s a GMO, but it produces about 70% less methane than do more traditional varieties. Now, considering the amount of rice that gets consumed in Asia, let alone around the rest of the world? I won’t say that it’s a game changer, but it is definitely a fantastic step forward. 

All of this that we’ve been talking about though, I think that this is the most insane part. 

In the West, and again I live in the US, we love our pilot projects. We’ll give tax breaks here, and throw some grants over there, but China? They’re overhauling their entire economy, all at once. Think about it: the grid, the factories, the workforce, the urban layout—everything. They’re juggling a heck of a lot of balls at the moment and, whenever there’s a lot of balls in the air, some are gonna be dropped. There are risks, and the scale is absolutely massive, (I said that word again). The timeline is, well, I’m going to say really tight. And there’s a very real chance that they’re not going to be able to hit that target.

But if they get even 80% of the way there? That is a game changer. And it’s not just a game changer for them. It’s a game changer for all of us.

And, I think this a good point to wrap up Again, this is just a very brief overview of what’s happening in China. Again, I find it a place of…well it’s interesting. 

On one hand, we have the whole lack of free speech thing, and some of the business practices that well, not exactly the way we do things in the rest of the world. But, to their credit, they are incredibly smart and amazingly intentional. And, if they’ve proved anything, it’s that they are innovative beyond belief.  Look at the focus that they had on manufacturing, in willing themselves to dominate that industrial space. Now, they’re taking that same focus, that same intention, and applying it to cleaning up their country. 

Xi Jinping just gave a speech at a Leaders meeting on Climate recently, where he stated, very strongly, “that harmony between man and nature is a defining feature of Chinese modernization”. 

Regardless of your opinion on China, they’re definitely setting themselves up to be the loudest voice in the room, bar none, when it comes to the conversation on global climate change. And I get the feeling though that Xi Jinping really does care, I don’t think it’s all talk or political maneuvering. I really do think that he does truly care about this stuff. Whatever the case, they’ve got a lot of work ahead of them but, they’re attacking it with that intention, they’re all in, which definitely isn’t a bad thing. It’s pretty encouraging actually.

Anyway, let’s stop this right here, what is up next week? I’d really like to start talking about some of the technological solutions that we have available to us and that are being put forward, but haven’t quite been implemented yet. Carbon capture would be a natural starting point given this week’s topic, but I also read a story out of Florida where a company who sells carbon credits was shut down by the EPA for polluting the stratosphere. 

There are some pretty intriguing technologies, some pretty cool ideas about how to fix things by doing stuff in the stratosphere. But who the heck do we get permission from to do those things, who owns the space, who owns the air in the stratosphere? 

We’ll talk about something like that, either carbon capture, which has some pretty cool stuff that’s associated with it, or the working in the stratosphere thing. 

Until then, thank you so much for joining me today on Running my mouth off about Climate change. I hope you have an absolutely amazing week.