Environment China

By popular request, the podcast turns to the topic of electric vehicles and trying to look at this from a market perspective instead of a policy perspective, and really examine how the market works and how it breaks down in terms of EV characteristics and market shares. Today we are speakng to two EV experts: Tu Le of Sino Auto Insights, a mobility consultancy, and of China Evs and More podcast; and James Gao (Gao Tianjian) of Mercedes and the Beijing Energy Network.

In this podcast we discuss:

1. Why EV sales in China are surging
2. What types of vehicles are seeing the most growth, and how similar Chinese vehicles are to EVs abroad
3. How the market breaks down in terms of foreign vs domestic
4. How China is able to scale up manufacturing of potentially globally competitive products, and which EVs have the most export potential
5. The situation with battery swap, which is now expanding from NIO and BAIC to new players
6. The charging situation for China's apartment dwellers

We end the podcast with a game of buy-sell-or-hold, where we challenge our guests to identify the probability of different future EV scenarios, such as whether a Chinese EV will be a top seller worldwide (outside of China) in 2025.

China EVs and More is available on all the finest podcasting platforms. You can follow Sino Auto Insights and listen to their live podcasts on Twitter Spaces here:

https://twitter.com/SinoAutoInsight

https://twitter.com/derznovich

Access our Live event on the link above!!

Just a short teaser to tell you about an experiment we are planning to try on Monday morning BJ time, Sunday night U.S. time. Joyce and I will be hosting a Twitter Live interview with James Gao of BEN and Tu Le of Sino Auto Insights and the China EVs and More podcast. If we manage to figure out the technical stuff, it will start at 8:00 am Monday China time, and that's 7 pm Eastern, 4 pm Pacific on Sunday.

In this upcoming episode, we are going to talk about the China EV market, which is poised to surpass 3 million vehicles this year and 5 million next year. We're going to talk about China's EV startups, international brands, and what makes China so disruptive in the EV space. We'll touch on some issues like range, design, battery size, and charging. We'll bring it back to the issue of emissions and the environment, and take your questions. If all goes well, we'll play a game of buy-sell-or-hold with our esteemed guests, and our audience will get to play too!

So looking forward to seeing you there with us, LIVE, on the Environment China podcast on Twitter Spaces, Sunday night US time, Monday morning China time! You can access the Live event on the link above.

The food industry has a major ecological and climate impact. A wide variety of efforts are underway to reduce that impact, including regenerative 'agriculture, development and promotion of new or existing plant-based foods, and organic agriculture. In the EU and UK, for example, 40% of agricultural land use is influenced by the top 10 food brands and supermarkets. While many are currently part of the problem, given their size and influence, they can be, and need to be part of the solution.

Our guests today are Jinqi Yu of the Ellen Macarthur Foundation and Yifan Yang of Oatly.

Jinqi currently works as consultant for Food Program at the Ellen Macarthur Foundation. She is dedecated to accerlerate the transition towards a circular economy and has been working with the foundation since 2016.

Yifan is the sustainability manager at Oatly. She is responsible for the holistic sustainability in the value chain of Oatly. Founded in the 1990s, Oatly is a Swedish food company that produces alternatives to dairy products from oats. Oatly has boomed in Shanghai since entering the China market in 2018. The Swedish oat-based drink is one of the fastest growing milk alternatives in the market and has a devoted fan base worldwide.

"The Big Food Redesign," Ellen Macarthur Foundation, 2021, at https://ellenmacarthurfoundation.org/resources/food-redesign/overview.

Oatly Sustainability Report 2021: https://a.storyblok.com/f/107921/x/5f77aca2c2/oatly-sustainability-report-2021-web.pdf

"Greenhouse Gas Emissions from the Dairy Sector A Life Cycle Assessment," United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) report on Dairy Carbon Emissions, 2010, at https://www.fao.org/3/k7930e/k7930e00.pdf

Today we are back talking about global climate policy with Li Shuo of Greenpeace East Asia. The COP26 or Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change just wrapped up a bit more than a week ago and we've had time to take stock and see some of the media coverage of that, a lot of which was critical. We discuss the shortcomings of other countries' climate commitments, such as on climate finance. We are also digesting the communique issued by China and the US about climate cooperation.

In the podcast we referenced the optimistic scenario of Carbon Action Tracker, which projects 1.8 degrees C of climate change if all targets and commitments are fully implemented: https://climateactiontracker.org/global/temperatures/.

Today's episode is a very special episode for us, as we're honored to have three founding members of Beijing Energy Network, Brendan Acord, Jason Lee, and Julian Wong, with us to celebrate our approximately 100th episode at Environment China.

The episode has 3 very different parts. These time stamps should help you navigate:

1. In the first segment, starting at 0:03, we discuss how BEN got started, what made it different, and what it was like working on energy and the environment in 2008-09.
2. At 0:22, Joyce and Helena discuss BEN in the past few years and how it has evolved.
3. At 0:26, we look out to the next 13 years of world climate and energy futures, by playing a game of buy-sell-or-hold.

Our guests:

Brendan Acord came to China after graduating from UCSD, He worked at AES consulting and later BrightSource Energy, and he is currently in Chengdu where he manages a solar PV consultancy which has projects in China and abroad.

Julian Wong is a corporate lawyer, currently at QuantumScape, a company in Silicon Valley developing advanced battery materials. He's been passionate about environmental issues since growing up. He moved to China in 2008. He returned to DC and worked at the Center for American Progress, and then worked with David Sandalow at the Department of Energy on US-China issues.

Jason Lee, works in business strategy at AirBnB. He came to China under the Fulbright program working on China energy policy research. Afterwards he did energy consulting at McKinsey.

This year has been packed with China environmental and climate news, and there's no way this podcast could keep up. But today we're going to try!

Our guests today are Li Shuo of Greenpeace East Asia and Christoph Nedopil-Wang of Shanghai Fudan University (and Global Bavarian).

We're going to tackle the following hot topics:

• The biodiversity COP in Kunming
• The upcoming Glasgow COP
• The China announcement on finance for coal abroad
• And upcoming climate finance policies

Today, we have a fascinating discussion about corporate sustainability at one of China's most famous Internet companies. Guan Li, who joins on her own behalf, discusses her work on corporate sustainability in both the US and China and the status of Meituan's efforts on corporate sustainability and waste reduction/recycling.

Guan Li works as Senior Manager of Corporate Social Responsibility at Meituan Waimai, one of China's largest online food delivery apps. She leads the Meituan Green Tech fund program (greentech.meituan.com). Li has over six years of experience as a corporate sustainability professional. After graduation from Macalester College in St Paul, MN, she worked in sustainability roles at Metro Transit in Minnesota, at Amazon, and at the Chinese food delivery app Ele.me. She has expertise in energy efficiency, carbon emissions calculation, renewable energy, supply chain labor rights, and circular economy.

Time stamps:

0:55 - About Guan Li's work at Meituan

2:16 - The two main strategies: waste reduction and recycling

5:02 - Meituan's role in reducing waste

7:58 - What the data show (or don't show) on waste from food delivery

10:32 - Meituan and carbon neutrality

12:10 - Waste sorting in different cities

13:19 - Green Tech Fund

15:05 - US-China differences

Today we will be talking about a new report that discusses one of the most critical topics for global emissions reduction: How China's most carbon-intensive industries are planning to decarbonize. Since September 2020 when President Xi Jinping announced that China would aim to peak emissions before 2030 and reach carbon neutrality by 2060, some of China's biggest companies have committed to new climate targets to meet that national goal. In this report, Columbia Center for Global Energy Policy Non-Resident Fellow and Princeton PhD student Ned Downie looks at the three of the highest emitting industries in China: electricity, steel, and cement and helps us understand exactly what those announcements add up to.

Further reading:

Edmund Downie, "Getting to 30-60: How China's Biggest Coal Power, Cement, and Steel Corporations Are Responding to National Decarbonization Pledges," Columbia Center on Global Energy Policy, 25 August 2021, at https://www.energypolicy.columbia.edu/research/report/getting-30-60-how-china-s-biggest-coal-power-cement-and-steel-corporations-are-responding-national.

"Major News | A Carbon Emissions Declaration from the World's Biggest Steel Firm, China Baowu: Aiming for 'Carbon Peaking' in 2023 and for Achieving 'Carbon Neutrality' in 2050," January 20, 2021, at http://mp.weixin.qq.com/s?__biz=MjM5MDEzNzA5Ng==&mid=2654852246&idx=1&sn=d479656526315c56691b0101482a16af&chksm=bd801af18af793e733b0f5cdd0d7d101eef0150feb831bddf9d705673f715b6128e57e0619d0#rd.

"HBIS Announces Low-Carbon Green Development Action Plan," HBIS WeChat channel, March 12, 2021, at http://mp.weixin.qq.com/s?__biz=MzA5MjA2Mjk3MA==&mid=2653109712&idx=1&sn=9539988bd1af53094e892177fc7752db&chksm=8ba54845bcd2c1533f04fc3a53789adb1e68c0dc5c3674a4007aea087b970cbaa2de89d27e83#rd.

Today we will be talking about China's new carbon market, from the market perspective, with Jeff Huang of AEX, a Hong Kong based company seeking to create a transparent and neutral forward trading facility for hedging power and emissions in China. AEX empowers China power and emissions market participants with market data and analytical tools, market insight, and by sharing international trading and risk-management best-practices.

Here are a few things we cover in this episode:

• An assessment of early trading in China's newly launched national carbon market.
• We hear Jeff's opinion on how benchmark allocation could evolve into auction-based allocation.
• Jeff discusses clean-dark spreads, which is the difference in price between the revenue from the power price versus the costs in terms of fuel (the coal price) plus the carbon price.
• Jeff talks about the provincial spot electricity market pilots, in particular Guangdong, and how much traders have to learn to master these markets.
• We discuss the importance of futures contracts, which are contracts that obligate the parties to transact an asset at a predetermined future date and price. We discuss the benefits of futures in terms of providing market price forecasts as well as enabling generators to reduce risks.
• We discuss whether carbon markets might evolve to provide a meaningful long-term signal rather than only a short-term price signal.

[Special note: due to microphone issues, the audio quality on this episode was somewhat poor, and may require listening in a quiet place. We think you will find the content compelling nonetheless.]

Today we will be talking about some recent issues related to climate change in China, especially the launch of trading on China's national carbon trading system, as well as coverage of recent flooding in Henan province. Our guest today is Liu Hongqiao, China Specialist with Carbon Brief.

Hongqiao holds a masters in international relations (specialising in international energy) from Sciences Po in France. She previously worked as an independent consultant covering water, climate change and wildlife. Prior to that, Hongqiao was a Beijing-based journalist and analyst writing for publications such as Caixin and China Dialogue.

Carbon Brief is a UK-based website covering the latest developments in climate science, climate policy and energy policy, specialised in data-driven articles and graphics to help improve the understanding of climate change, both in terms of the science and the policy response.

Topics we cover in detail today:

• Assessment of China's newly-launched carbon emissions trading system (ETS)
• How the ETS will evolve
• Whether the ETS will reduce emissions directly, or play a minor or supporting role
• Misconceptions about China's Five-Year Plan and 2030-2060 carbon peaking and carbon neutrality goals
• Global media and scientific coverage of extreme weather
• How Chinese media have approached the issue of climate attribution

Important references from Carbon Brief:

You Xiaoying, "China issues new 'single-game' instructions to guide its climate action," Carbon Brief, 4 August 2021, at https://www.carbonbrief.org/china-issues-new-single-game-instructions-to-guide-its-climate-action.

Liu Hongqiao, "In-depth Q&A: Will China's emissions trading scheme help tackle climate change?," Carbon Brief, 24 June 2021, at https://www.carbonbrief.org/in-depth-qa-will-chinas-emissions-trading-scheme-help-tackle-climate-change.

Geert Jan van Oldenborgh et al., "­­­Lessons learned from five years of extreme weather 'rapid attribution'," Carbon Brief, 12 May 2021, at https://www.carbonbrief.org/guest-post-lessons-learned-from-five-years-of-extreme-weather-rapid-attribution.

Liu Hongqiao et al., "Q&A: What does China's 14th 'five year plan' mean for climate change?," Carbon Brief, 12 March 2021, at https://www.carbonbrief.org/qa-what-does-chinas-14th-five-year-plan-mean-for-climate-change.

"China Briefing, 29 July 2021: Lessons from deadly flooding; Definition of 'carbon neutrality'; UK-China nuclear tensions," Carbon Brief, 29 July 2021, at https://www.carbonbrief.org/china-briefing-29-july-2021-lessons-from-deadly-flooding-definition-of-carbon-neutrality-uk-china-nuclear-tensions.

Other reports mentioned by Hongqiao:

Valerie J. Karplus, "China's CO2 Emissions Trading System: History, Status, and Outlook," Harvard Belfer Center, June 2021, at https://www.belfercenter.org/publication/chinas-co2-emissions-trading-system-history-status-and-outlook.

International Energy Agency analysis of China ETS: https://www.iea.org/reports/the-role-of-chinas-ets-in-power-sector-decarbonisation

Transition Zero analysis of China ETS: https://www.transitionzero.org/insights/putting-chinas-carbon-market-in-perspective

Twitter thread from Liu Hongqiao on weather attribution: https://twitter.com/LHongqiao/status/1420784539547340811