Part 4 of Decarbonising the Built Environment: a Global Overview, by Tom Ackers
Download the whole series as a PDF here
The most dramatic example in history of production-based expansions in the built environment have taken place in China.
Since 1978, the Chinese economy has grown at around 10% per annum, as measured in terms of gross domestic product (GDP). Under Deng Xiaoping, the opening of the economy, and market reforms, coupled with massive state interventions, have brought large foreign capital inflows.
With its build-out in industrial and manufacturing capacity, rising incomes have drawn people to cities, spurring urban enlargement. Economic growth has therefore been the carrot for mass rural-urban migration; forced ejections by private enclosures of the countryside have been the stick – such that China’s rate of urban population growth has outpaced that of its population as a whole.
There has also been considerable urbanisation of the countryside “in situ”, either through the explosive growth of small towns, or the growth of whole cities from scratch. China has escaped both the “shock therapy” experienced by Russia in the 1990s, and other forms of structural adjustment that pushed poor regions to the wall.
China’s coal economy today is several orders of magnitude larger than the UK’s was in the 19th century. On a production basis, the UK’s annual CO2 emissions in 1900 were around 420 million tonnes; in 2020, China’s were 10.67 billion tonnes. Per capita, China’s production-based emissions have overtaken the EU-27. China’s consumption-based emissions have been rising towards Western footprint sizes, and today they are close to those of the EU-27.
In this part, I will look at China’s rapid economic expansion since the turn of the century, the role of the built environment in that (section 4.1), and at the discussion in China on future economic and climate policy (section 4.2).
4.1. China’s “great acceleration”
Since the turn of the century, and following China’s admission to the World Trade Organisation in 2001, an enormous growth spurt ensued in global material consumption – a second “great acceleration”, centered on China’s coastal export-production zones.
However, despite its “Chinese characteristics”, China’s development since the 1980s has been powered by a conventional embrace of fossil fuels. Its development model has been based entirely on the instrument of winning export share to a growing pie of world consumption. Increasingly, that “export” has been into China itself.
Unfortunately, China’s has been a coal-led boom, justified on grounds of energy security and economy. The fact that China has become the new centre of industrial and manufacturing production has returned the world economy to the bad old days of coal-based production and accumulation in England, only on a vastly greater scale.
In consequence, products manufactured in China have reliably out-competed competitor goods on price. But per commodity, per quantity of use-value, or per mass of commodities, they have also tended to have a larger embodied carbon footprint. And since the volume of Chinese production has been so great, the emissions effects have been huge.
China’s production-based emissions really took off on the back of coal around 2000.
But production has not simply shifted to pre-existing export production zones in China. Rather, world industrial and manufacturing production to a large extent physically reconstituted itself in China on a vastly expanded material and energetic base.
That has imposed huge material and emissions footprints in the enlarged scale of production – and in construction of the built environment too. The statistics are notorious. “How China used more cement in 3 years than the U.S. did in the entire 20th Century”, one headline said.
“Construction” here includes the infrastructure that has allowed China to add volume to the existing relations of fossil-intensive production, circulation and consumption globally. It also includes speculative real estate. Production for export has been the chosen path to economic expansion; construction has been the lever.
Construction has therefore come ahead of stimulating incomes or household consumption, or of addressing social needs directly. Construction also remains the favoured tool for moderating the effects of economic shocks, via the fiscal firepower of state-owned banks.
Throughout the post-2001 boom, the result has been frequently over-zealous symphonies in concrete, dedicated to capital and the Chinese state. A ready inflow of speculative capital and a stream of building permits have left whole “ghost cities” part-built, dormant and unused – a flagrant sign of speculative oversteers and over-production.
Nevertheless, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) continues to favour construction as a means to pump-prime economic growth.
The problem is not just the scale of production per se, but its energetic basis in coal, and its mis-direction with respect to real human needs.
Even without coal, construction is among the most emissions-heavy forms of production, and much of that concerns the enormous embodied emissions (including the “process” emissions) of concrete and steel production (see part 7).
China’s development since 1978 has done a great deal of good domestically, insofar as it has significantly depressed burdens of disease, and raised standards of living. But the 1990s were an inflection point. After the suppression of pro-democracy protests on Tiananmen Square in 1989, a policy of rushing headlong into export-led growth was adopted.
This policy choice was about three things, Richard Smith, the Marxist historian of China, argues. First, for geopolitical and world historical reasons, the CCP engaged in a competitive race to grow the size of the Chinese economy. Second, to tame the political ambitions of its people, it sought maximum employment – often comprising make-work projects superfluous to genuine social need. Third, this also involved lifting consumption, but along the lines of excess consumerism – meant again to sate, pacify and distract China’s population.
China’s birth rateseems already to have undergone the lion’s share of its moderation before the top-down coercive measures of its One-Child Policy were introduced in 1980. The dominant drivers of fertility reduction, even after the policy’s introduction, were policies of public health intervention that were common worldwide, alongside the various socioeconomic changes outlined in part 3, and related shifts in social attitudes to fertility.
During the 1990s, 165 million people in China were lifted out of poverty, where this is measured as living on less than the $1.08 per day (1993 prices at Purchasing Power Parity). At a $1.25 (2005 PPP) poverty line, the number is 400 million.
The anthropologist Jason Hickel points out that it was only thanks to China, and some creative accounting, that the UN was able to construe its poverty-reducing Millenium Development Goal 1 as a success. Yet it was China that specifically rejected the UN’s development advice in the 1980 and 1990s, which was to follow the prescriptions of the World Bank and IMF.
China’s economy probably only boomed as it did because of the state’s willingness to pump prime and selectively direct foreign direct investments to its domestic advantage. Foreign firms have been obliged to partner with local and state-bankrolled enterprises, and this has facilitated a very effective technological transfer that Chinese firms have been well-placed to exploit.
Moreover, having side-stepped shock therapy and avoided ceding control of the economy to foreign investment banks, the Chinese state, regions, and state-owned banks have been able to channel huge monetary resources into fiscal expansion. They have financially back-stopped the “private” domestic engines of that expansion, wherever that has been deemed strategically necessary.
In short, the expansion of fossil capitalism in China has been produced by two factors. (1) A policy choice to pursue economic development according to existing competitive, fossil-capitalist norms. (2) The needs of global capital to plug into ready sources of labour, export infrastructure, and material resources. The scale of the resulting production-based emissions has been due to coal as the strategic fuel of choice.
To reiterate the message from the graphs above: as of 2019, China’s production-based CO2 emissions were 28.6% of the world total. China’s growth in emissions has been the largest component of global emissions growth post-2000.
China’s GDP per capita in 2021 (~US$12,500) was around 25% that of the UK (~US$47,000), and ~18% that of the USA (~US$69,000)[1] – but China’s per-capita consumption-based CO2 emissions (averaging across all regions and social classes) are now about 85% those of the EU-27 and UK. Many of those consumption-based emissions from China are presumably due to disproportionately high embodied emissions in the built environment, which come from the reconstruction of global production there since the 1990s, on the back of coal – and rehousing a large proportion of the population in order to do that.[2]
China is now second only to the USA in its cumulative production- and consumption-based CO2 emissions by country. However, when correcting for population size, China is nowhere near the top in cumulative per-capita CO2 emissions, even on a production basis.
There is an argument that says China has at least some right to consume fossil fuels and to emit greenhouse gases on a scale comparable to the historical emissions of the most developed nations, like those of the EU-27 and the United States.
In terms of morality, one counter-argument could begin by urging the exceptional and existential nature of the climate crisis over and above other valid development needs. I could also point out the historical recklessness of China having departed on its fossil-intensive path of development once the facts of global warming were well known. (That applies to all fossil-heavy and fossil-dependent investment after 1990 at the very latest.)
The science of global warming was pretty secure by the early 1980s – some argue it was much earlier. Yet the major powers failed to change the course of their own fossil-backed development up through the 1980s and beyond – due to political indifference, vested interest, and campaigns of misinformation. But the sheer speed and scale of fossil-backed growth in China after the 1990s has been in another league.
Moreover, a fossil-intensive path of development was not the only available path of development. The CCP need not have simply plugged China into the status quo of fossil capitalism.
Alternative, more ecologically sustainable paths, that need not have compromised development needs, were available. Greener alternatives were suggested – for example, by Deng Yingtao in 1991 – but were not heeded.[3]
The CCP chose instead what Deng termed the “classical” route of development. This meant working the lever of competitive production on a coal-fired basis, to deliver rapid returns to capital and per-capita income gains. The built environment and human settlement were shaped to fit, via rapidly expanding cities and infrastructure, delivering low-cost workers and materials to logistically-convenient manufacturing hubs.
That economy, and that production – like the vast majority of all capitalist production – have been based on any old production that brings the healthiest return. Social needs have certainly been met on a greater scale, and human development indices have continued to move in a positive direction. But social needs have been re-made, and perverted to meet the needs of capital and state, instead of being addressed directly.
Moreover, along that export-based path, while domestic consumption has grown according to a western norm of “excess”, China’s GDP growth has depended nonetheless on a relative suppression of domestic economic demand, growing and maintaining enormous levels of domestic economic inequality.
In a capitalist economy, ordinary household income is what really counts when it comes to maintaining economic growth and increasing welfare over the long run. But in China, household income is very low, as the economist Michael Pettis has pointed out. Workers’ income, at roughly 50%, comprises one of the lowest shares of GDP of any country in history, Pettis writes. He suggests that China’s “real, underlying growth rate” is “probably around half reported growth rates”.
That skewed export economy has expanded with scant regard for the wider ecology, to say nothing of the absence of individual political freedoms.
After the financial crash of 2008, China’s export trade declined; it rebounded after 2010, but then declined again. Global capital flows and value chains stopped expanding. Arguably, the benefits of export production narrowed and slowed. The political dominance of “hyper globalisation“ and its advocates also waned.
Since 2017, the CCP has sought to reduce the “urban bias” of its development policy.
As of May 2020, and in the context of sharpening geopolitical and trade rifts with the US, China put in place a so-called “dual circulation” policy. This meant that the Chinese state would focus above all on building out “internal” domestic circuits of production, distribution and consumption; and aim for “external circulation” only so far as necessary. The direction of China’s internal energy economy, outlined briefly below, is an important part of that.
With its intervention into Evergrande’s liquidity crisis in August/September 2021, the CCP also set itself the mammoth task of engineering a “managed collapse” of the company, and winding down the level of speculation in the overall real estate sector.
By this time, such a policy had already been on the cards for a while. The CCP’s 14th Five-Year Plan (14FYP), drafted in October 2020, and passed by the National People’s Congress in March 2021, stated: “We will uphold the principle that housing is for living rather than for speculation.”
Since the 1990s, the CCP has sought to develop competitively and capitalistically on the established high-energy norms of production, distribution and consumption. And this remains the case now, even as the CCP focuses more on domestic “internal circulation”, and a massive build-out in green energy.
Like most capitalist countries, and thanks to popular pressure and binding international treaties such as the 2015 Paris agreement, China has also been investing in emissions reductions. However, in China’s case, that entails an enormous course correction.
China prioritises continued economic growth, combined with continuity in the supply of energy and energy security. Everything seems to boil down to “stability” – political stability, economic stability, energy stability.
Yet, the danger – elsewhere, too, but more so for China – is that established norms of consumption, the economy, and the built environment, and their energy- and carbon-intensity, are themselves a barrier, hard to reform, and “locked in” for the future. So the forms of consumption encouraged by policy are an obstruction to a sustainable future.
Despite the turn to “dual circulation”, it is also obscure to what extent future development stands to decrease economic inequality, and lift the income share of GDP.
All of that said, China has so far made by far the largest historical contribution of any single state to building out infrastructures of renewable energy, and to decarbonising industry.
This is as it should be, given that China contains so large a slice of existing global productive capacity, and that China’s productive capacity is disproportionately CO2-intensive thanks to a continued reliance on coal.
By the end of 2020, China’s installed wind and solar capacity far outstripped any other country, at 536 gigawatts (GW), compared to the EU’s total of 354 GW. (See the chart below.) By the end of 2022, China had 366 GW of installed wind capacity, and 393 GW of installed solar capacity – so, ~760 GW in total.
I outline in Appendix 2, however, how China’s coal-fired power capacity continues to expand alongside renewables, in order to secure continuity of supply. (See Appendix 2: China’s climate policies, in the PDF version.)
4.2. China’s future
More important still are China’s plans for the future. At the UN in March 2021, Chinese premier Xi Jinping announced the CCP’s so-called 2030/2060 “dual carbon targets”: to peak China’s domestic CO2 emissions before 2030 and to achieve what Xi termed “carbon neutrality” before 2060.
It is the 2030/2060 goals that form the backbone of China’s nationally determined contribution (NDC) under the 2015 Paris agreement, Article 4 of which requires that NDCs represent the “highest possible ambition”, oriented towards “achieving the purpose of this Agreement”.[4]
The CCP’s 14th Five Year Plan, covering 2021-25, is linked to these goals. (See Appendix 2, in the PDF version.)
China’s NDC remains focused entirely on CO2 emissions to 2030. Researchers at Climate Action Tracker see the 2060 goal as focused on CO2 only, to the exclusion of other greenhouse gases.
They estimate that, if all greenhouse gas emissions were subject to China’s NDC pledges, it could be in striking distance of meeting Paris-compatible emissions goals – but, as things stand, China’s decarbonisation efforts are “consistent with global warming of over 2°C and up to 3°C by the end of the century (if all countries had this level of ambition)”.
The Paris agreement makes unspecified allowance for “common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities, in the light of different national circumstances”. Implementation is placed, “in the context of sustainable development and efforts to eradicate poverty”; while, “recognising that peaking will take longer for developing country Parties”.
These phrases give the Chinese government wide room for manoeuvre in deciding the pace of decarbonisation.
The CCP claims for China a degree of exceptionalism under a normative “right to development” – with a “right to pollute” on the basis that “China still needs to develop”.
But to what level? In what form? What kind of development? When has “development” proceeded far enough?
According to World Bank metrics, China is an upper-middle income nation – as noted above, GDP/capita is about US$12,500. The CCP seemingly wants to maintain high returns to capital (including state capital), high rates of employment, the promise of rising incomes, and high and rising levels of domestic material consumption – all within the status quo ante of production and consumption on the established model.
The ambition, presumably, is to pursue the established pattern of economic gains unabated as far as possible, and in the meantime retrofit the economy with an eco-modern, low-carbon energy base.
And aside the very welcome build-out in renewables capacity, production and consumption remain oriented on any-old production for which profitable returns can be made. It is the capitalist way.
In these circumstances, it may be crude simply to counterpose emissions reductions to economic growth and political stability. But insofar as the Chinese economy depends heavily on coal, the aims of economic growth and reduced emissions pull at least somewhat in contradictory directions – and will do so until the non-fossil energetic basis of the Chinese economy is suitably enlarged.
Most rich industrialised economies have now peaked their territorial greenhouse gas emissions, and are enjoying 30-40 years ostensibly to transition to net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by mid-century – though many of the planned routes look spurious, such as an over-reliance on carbon capture and storage (CCS).
You can see the projected course of emissions (CO2e) reductions in the graphs below – for China, and a handful of other major economies. Note the equally steep, but longer-lasting, reduction in per capita emissions demanded of the USA.
According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the consensus scientific view indicates that a “linear path” of abatement is economically optimal – that is, not delaying the heavy lifting for later.[5]
According to analysis by the Institute for Climate Change and Sustainable Development (ICCSD) at Tsinghua University, it is also economically optimal not to delay, but to proceed faster and sooner with decarbonisation efforts.
It is inevitable that the early years of energy transition are the hardest, and that it becomes easier the further you go into it.
Ever since the 14FYP, commentators have noted that the CCP often under-promises and over-delivers. Recent upward revisions in planned renewables capacity need to be seen in that context.
If the goal of peaking CO2 emissions by 2030 and then reaching net-zero CO2 by 2050 were to be met, with net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2060, that would mean China cutting its overall emissions at an average rate of ~10% per year after 2030.[6]
The China researcher Lauri Myllyvirta estimates that, with the rise in tempo of the original 14FYP, if the 2060 zero-carbon, net-zero greenhouse gas emissions goal were to be met, China would need to average 150-200 GW of new renewables capacity installed every year after 2025. That is around 20-25% of total installed capacity at the end of 2022.
Recent increases in renewables capacity targets are very welcome. However, they need to be met with a qualitative shift in the forms of end consumption – fewer cars, less air conditioning. This would entail a thorough re-engineering of China’s built environment, as well as all other sectors of the economy.
Energy needs should also be met through more efficient uses of energy. For instance, air conditioners should be replaced with heat pumps and district cooling; and buildings should be designed in order to minimise the need for extra energy. (See parts 8 and 10.)
It is very well to say that homes are for living in, instead of speculating with. But the point should also be to live well, and live sustainably.
Yet little seems to have changed in the CCP’s bias towards any old construction as the lever to achieving GDP growth.
Since the Covid pandemic, China’s administrative authority has introduced several rounds of stimulus, aiming to “revive” real estate while deflating the bubble, and pushing new spending in infrastructure.
With spending overseen by the provinces, infrastructure stimulus would likely divide fairly evenly between developing new coal-fired capacity, and bringing in the new renewables and electricity infrastructure that are essential for the CCP’s 2060 decarbonisation agenda, Myllyvirta argues.
The weight of coal within this policy response would, “determine whether China’s emissions have already peaked, or whether they will rebound before peaking later this decade.” The role of provincial politics is key, for managing coal as only an occasional “support” for renewables.
As of the end of Q2 2022, China’s economy had registered four consecutive quarters of falling emissions, compared with those same quarters in 2021.
By the first quarter of 2023, China passed the “symbolic milestone” of renewables and nuclear power capacity combined comprising more than 50% of installed power capacity.
Emissions in 2023 have been rising again. (See the chart below.)
The main cause of the rise is that, so far, China’s demand for electricity has grown in 2023 compared to 2022, despite its stalling economy. China’s CO2 emissions in the first three months of 2023 were up 4% on the same period in 2022.
The growth in emissions in 2023 has been driven by industrial demand, Carbon Brief reports. Next to that, a summer of record high temperatures, just like in 2022, has ensured that operational energy consumption from air conditioning remained enormous in 2023. Household electricity consumption fell on 2022, with fewer people hunkered at home – but consumption from offices and the service sector grew.
Moreover, according to Carbon Brief, the recourse to coal in order to meet peak demand has also led China recently to exploit a degraded quality of domestic coal, with a lower energy content per tonne burned. The CCP has ended up importing coal, revealing some limits in its energy security policy.
The next major cause of the emissions rises after energy consumption was higher production volumes of construction materials – with their process emissions. Complaints have followed, that the outputs of heavy industry are of greater concern to the CCP than air quality.
The third major cause has been a greater use of oil products than the year before – such as in transport. Once again, that follows on the turn away from zero-Covid.
Updated analysis by Lauri Myllyvirta now suggests that China’s emissions could peak in 2024.
Meanwhile, a new stage of interstate rivalry, especially between China and the USA, has begun. The US has its Inflation Reduction Act, which aims to make the US a renewables manufacturing powerhouse and reduce dependence on imports from China.
China has reached a point of diminishing returns on infrastructure investment, the historian Adam Tooze has argued – but China’s investments in green energy infrastructures need to accelerate over the next decade and more. That needs to happen whether or not those investments translate into greater aggregate profits.
More broadly, huge questions remain over the carbon content of any future reorganisations in global production, and anticipated accelerations in urban development. Any substantial enlargement of the material basis of world production, wherever it happens, would likely outstrip any shift to renewable energy, or any other carbon mitigation measures, if it remained simply any-old production.
More factories and yet more materials in motion, more cement and steel deposited in infrastructure, fixed capital, and real estate.
And yet, a radical redistribution is required in the use-values available for humanity as a whole. Moreover, economies throughout the global south need to industrialise along a green development pathway, if they are to build out their own capacities in green energy, and impose a sustainable form on the built environment.
The argument by Michael Pettis and others is that China needs to stimulate domestic household consumption to get out of the growth doldrums. I think that is convincing. But the form of consumption is crucial – it cannot continue on the old model.
There is also plenty of real demand going unmet – inside China and the world over – for existing and future products of industry and manufacturing. The obstacle to meeting that real demand cannot and should not be construed in narrow purchasing power terms. There is a need globally to build-out green energy infrastructures, and to put human capacities to work for the good of all.
Failing to meet global needs would continue an ongoing disaster for the world’s poor. Failing to meet those needs in a sustainable way would be disastrous for the world’s environment . What is needed, urgently, is “contraction and convergence” (see part 6).
All of this suggests that China, along with other states, should pursue a policy akin to a Green Lend-Lease. Outlays of their own currency (via overt monetary financing – see here and here), should be made in order to ventilate a flow of green finance from existing centres of capital to the economic “periphery”.
Those transfers should be matched with technological transfers – on the model of China during its boom years – seeding hubs of expertise in green manufacturing wherever they are needed, alongside green building technologies, electrification, and the production of all other necessary use-values.
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[1] Consumption-based CO2 emissions in this case represent the effective trade balance in embodied carbon, excluding CO2 emissions from land-use change. As you can see in the graphs below, about 10% of China’s domestic CO2 emissions (~1 billion tonnes CO2/year) are embodied in goods that get exported for consumption elsewhere; whereas the US presently consumes about an extra 7% (~0.4 billion tonnes CO2) in imported embodied CO2 emissions, above those that are produced and consumed domestically.
[2] In Appendix 1, in the PDF version, I explain that, although many buildings and infrastructure are put in place to enable exports, the associated embodied emissions are very often under-counted in the consumption-based emissions accounts of importing countries.
[3] You can read about Deng Yingtao on People and Nature here and here.
[4] The purpose of the Paris agreement includes holding global temperatures “well below” 2°C above pre-industrial levels, and aiming to limit them to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. To do that, global greenhouse gas emissions should peak “as soon as possible”, rapidly reduce after that, and reach net-zero emissions “in the second half of the century”.
According to the IPCC, meeting those aims means reaching net-zero of CO2 emissions globally by around 2050, alongside deep reductions in methane emissions and other greenhouse gases. After 2050, negative CO2 emissions – active CO2 removal – will be needed to abate residual non-CO2 emissions. (See here for a useful overview.)
[5] See the IPCC’s 2018 Special Report on Global warming of 1.5°C
[6] These are my approximations – but similar numbers are given in the ICCSD research
People and Nature 