Is China’s Transition Moving Fast Enough?

BBC World Service report.

China’s overwhelming dominance in renewables discussed, but can they move away from fossil fuels fast enough to impact climate change?

“At the moment, China’s emissions are flatlining”- but too soon to declare victory.

The BBC report discusses the quandary of poor Chinese home owners who have heated with coal, and are now being pushed to switch to more-expensive gas.

New York Times:

Across Hebei, which encircles China’s capital, Beijing, villagers like Mr. Dong are confronting the full cost of the country’s push for cleaner air. The central government has banned burning coal for residential heating in much of the province since 2017, in an effort to reduce the choking air pollution that enveloped the capital every winter. At first, local governments eased the transition by heavily subsidizing natural gas, which is cleaner but more expensive.

But this winter, officials sharply cut or eliminated the subsidies.

Reports of villagers huddling under multiple blankets or secretly burning firewood for warmth — firewood is banned, too — had circulated widely on Chinese social media. They spurred calls, including in major state-run news outlets, to relax the coal ban or restore subsidies. But China’s gains in air quality have been a political priority for the government, and many of the reports were quickly censored.

While villagers ration their heat, Beijing officials are celebrating a victory. Last week, the city announced it had recorded only one day of heavy pollution in 2025, a 98 percent drop compared with 2013. Officials held up the improvement as proof of the success of Beijing’s “blue sky defense war.” 

“It was a top-down, authoritarian environmental policy of, we want to improve the air quality in Beijing. And often Hebei has to bear the cost,” said Cosimo Ries, an energy analyst at Trivium China, a consulting firm.

The expense of the government’s clean air campaign and its heavy-handed enforcement were a concern from the start, when officials descended upon villagers’ homes to confiscate their coal furnaces and fined or detained violators. Demand for gas overwhelmed supply, and some subsidies were slow to arrive. Hebei delayed its full transition from coal to 2020 as public anger grew.

Other vulnerabilities became clear in 2023, as global energy shocks collided with financial pressure at home. 

The soaring price of natural gas, driven in part by Russia’s war in Ukraine, led energy companies in Hebei to cut off residential customers in favor of higher-paying industrial users. To ease the shortages, the government loosened price controls on residential gas, allowing utilities to pass on costs to households, but that meant gas became even more expensive. At the same time, some local governments were already struggling to pay out subsidies, because they were deeply in debt and the economy was slowing.