China Cooks the Carbon Emissions Books
Beijing redefines a key metric to make itself look greener.
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Unlike the West’s green radicals, China isn’t willing to sacrifice its economy to meet its climate pledges. But Beijing isn’t above cooking its carbon books to gull Western activists into thinking it is.
At United Nations climate conferences in Copenhagen in 2009 and Paris in 2015, Beijing vowed sizeable reductions in the amount of carbon China emits per dollar of gross domestic product, or carbon intensity. Subsequent national planning documents reiterated this goal.
Beijing’s statistics have since suggested it would fall far from delivering on this climate promise. And last September the head of China’s Ministry of Ecology and Environmentadmitted that “controlling carbon emission intensity is challenging.”
Yet suddenly in March China reported that it had achieved a 17.7% reduction in carbon intensity between 2020 and 2025—a sliver short of its 18% goal. Earlier official numbers had suggested a reduction of only 12.4% over the same period. Credit Lauri Myllyvirta of the nonprofit Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air for spotting this discrepancy and sleuthing out its cause.
“It is clear that there has been a major shift in the way that China measures its carbon intensity, specifically in terms of which types of emissions are included,” Mr. Myllyvirta writes in a report for the British climate news site Carbon Brief. A footnote in China’s latest statistical communiqué further suggests a redefinition of the metric.
Previously, China factored in all fossil-fuel consumption as it calculated carbon intensity. The new calculus retrospectively cherry-picks which carbon emissions count. One of the bigger howlers is the exclusion of some emissions from chemical production or the manufacture of plastics, both booming industries.
This redefinition “effectively halves the rate of growth in China’s CO2 [carbon dioxide] emissions over the past five years,” Mr. Myllyvirta says. With the stroke of a pen, Beijing has created a statistical gap more or less equal to the total emissions of South Korea or Germany.
In 2022 President Xi Jinping said carbon goals shouldn’t come at the expense of energy and food security or the “normal life” of Chinese people. Tell that to the climate fanatics in Europe and the U.S., who like to trumpet Beijing’s investments in solar or electric vehicles as evidence that even China is on board with their agenda. Next time they should try a little less trust and a little more verify.
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Appeared in the June 1, 2026, print edition as 'China Cooks the Carbon Emissions Books'.
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