People's Republic of China Fossil-Fuel CO₂ Emissions

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According to reported energy statistics, coal production and use in China has increased ten-fold since the early 1960s. As a result, Chinese fossil-fuel CO₂ emissions have grown a remarkable 79.2% since 2000 alone. At 1.66 billion metric tons of carbon in 2006, the People's Republic of China has surpassed the United States as the world's largest emitter of CO₂ due to fossil-fuel use and cement production. Even with the reported decline in Chinese emissions from 1996 to 1998, China's industrial emissions of CO₂ have grown phenomenally since 1950, when China stood tenth among nations based on annual fossil-fuel CO₂ emissions. From 1970 to 1996, China's fossil-fuel CO₂ emissions grew at an annual rate of 5.3%. Growth has occurred largely in the use of coal, not suprising given China is the world's largest coal producer, which accounted for 98.7% of the emissions total in 1950 and 72.9% in 2006. Liquid fuels now contribute 15.7% of emissions and have grown appreciably over the past decade. The anomalous peak for 1958-61 is common in Chinese data. These years are part of the period "The Great Leap Forward," and whether the anomaly represents a real event in CO₂ emissions or a data residual is not clear. China is the world's largest hydraulic cement producer. In 2006 China produced over 1.2 billion metric tons of hydraulic cement, or roughly 47% of the world's production. Emissions from cement production account for 9.8% of China's 2006 total industrial CO₂ emissions. China's population has doubled over the past four decades and now exceeds 1.3 billion people. Per capita emissions increased considerably over this period and 2006 marks the first year China's per capita emission rate (1.27 metric tons of carbon) exceeded the global average (1.25 metric tons of carbon).