China’s emissions a wild card as G-20 weighs global stimulus

The silver lining of the global economic crisis may be a greener China this year, but the long-term forecast is less clear.

China claims it met its five-year plan’s pollution targets for the first time in 2008, as domestic energy demands dipped and global demand for Chinese manufactured goods slumped. Economists are forecasting weaker gross domestic product (GDP) growth in 2009, suggesting China will reduce its sulfur dioxide and other industrial pollutants further.

For a developing economy, a lower GDP — the goods and services a country produces — generally means less emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. That should be the case in coal-fired China, but a surge of government stimulus spending on energy-intensive cement and steel infrastructure could merely slow the country’s CO2 growth, some experts caution. To prevent developing nations’ GDP from turning a darker shade of brown, Britain’s Prime Minister Gordon Brown and others are urging the world’s 20 largest economies to coordinate a "green New Deal."

U.N. economists project China’s GDP will grow 8 percent this year, down from a seven-year low of 9 percent last year. If recessions deepen in Europe and the United States, China’s GDP could rise 7 percent this year.

"The economy is certainly slowing, but I do not expect emissions to fall, especially in light of the economic stimulus package in which China will build its way out," said John Romankiewicz, a Beijing-based analyst with New Carbon Finance.