ABSTRACT
Climate change and energy security are two of the most important challenges facing the world today. These issues appear especially challenging for China due to a large population and a fossil fuel based energy-intensive development model. Facing frequent domestic energy shortages, increasing levels of air pollution, heavy reliance on imported energy stock, and the desire for a positive international image, China's attitude towards climate change mitigation gradually transformed from passive to proactive. China started to consider its energy security within the context of climate change. In its participation in Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), China largely pushed forward its renewable energy development. In the national Energy Conservation and Emission Reduction Scheme (ECERS) imitated from the start of the 11th Five-Year Plan, China focused on the retirement of inefficient small coal-fired power plants and the promotion of efficiency improvement. These policies and measures are to be the focal point of the book. By analysing the strengths and weaknesses of these policies, the overall effectiveness of China's climate-related energy policies will be understood and policy deficiencies can be addressed.
Greenhouse gases such as CO2, water vapour, and nitrous oxide are important components of the earth's atmosphere. They play a crucial role in maintaining a comfortable temperature for earth's inhabitants by trapping the sun's long-wave radiation. They also provide the basic nutrients for the earth's flora, which forms the foundation of the food chain and supports a diverse range of fauna (Le Treut et al. 2007, pp. 96–97; Obbard 2010, p. 69). We can say that humans would not exist without greenhouse gases. Greenhouse gases in the atmosphere had stayed relatively stable throughout human civilisation before industrialisation. However, since industrialisation, concentration of greenhouse gases, especially the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere, has been growing excessively and rapidly. The predominant cause of the increasing level of CO2 in the atmosphere is the burning of fossil fuels such as coal and oil which were formed from large deposits of ancient flora and fauna 360–290 million years ago. CO2, as one of the emissions of these fossil fuels, traps heat and thus strengthens the greenhouse effect of the atmosphere (Le Treut et al. 2007, p. 100; Oberthür & Ott 1999, p. 3). The early greenhouse effect theory was proposed by the Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius (1896) more than a hundred years ago. During the 1950s, Charles Keeling recorded and reviewed the first set of accurate data of the rising CO2 concentration levels at the Hawaii Mauna Loa Observatory (Anderson 2001, p.11). By November 2018, the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere reached 408.02 parts per million (ppm) which was over 45% of the pre-industrialisation level of 280 ppm (Earth System Research Laboratory NOAA 2019).
There is a range of scientific evidence that increasing amounts of CO2 in the atmosphere cause a stronger greenhouse effect which will alter the standard climate patterns on earth, leading to more frequent floods, hurricanes, droughts and bush fires, and cause sea level rises and gradual loss of biodiversity (Allison et al. 2009; IPCC 2007). Therefore, effective climate change mitigation is urgently needed in order to secure future prosperity of human societies.
