By Darrell Egan
Australian Minerals and Resources Minister Matt Canavan has been conjuring up a boogey man China comparison cop-out in not wanting to commit to clean energy targets, without any details of what he is comparing Australia to in regards to China.
If Matt is attempting to hold China up as an example of not making inroads to clean energy we really need to look at in detail what China has done in regards to moving towards clean energy.
From 2013 the Tsinghua University and Asian Development Bank has been producing Clean Energy reports for the Chinese Government.
This years report showed that China has one of the largest Green Financial markets with Green Loans exceeding $10.6 trillion and the issuing of Green Bonds exceeding $1.1 trillion.
In efforts in being part of an international Green Energy future China Co-Chairs the G20 Green Finance Study Group, co-founded the Network for Greening the Financial System and launched the Green International Principles with International partners as part of the Green Belt and Road Initiative to name a few of their environmental initiatives.
In cooperation with Mongolia the first Green Finance Tax scheme in Mongolia, with Technical assistance from the Tsinghua Green Finance Centre and the China Green Finance Committee. (See also Mongolia Green Taxonomy).
Further to this is on the ground grassroots efforts to tackle climate change in establishing the roots for the Billion Tree Project in which schools, community groups and private companies covered 23 per cent of China with forests in 2020.
These are initiatives Matt Canavan could learn from and get off the starting blocks.
In relation to China’s Electric Vehicle production their sales domestically increased by 8% and 43 % in export sales from 2019 to 2020. This increased sustained itself through the COVID pandemic.
With a population of 1.4 Billion people China plans to have 40 per cent of all vehicles in China sold to Electric Vehicles.
In relation to electric buses a 2018 Bloomberg New Energy Finance report found in 2016 that China was on average registering 340 buses a day in every single city in China.
In this same report it was found that in 2017 the circulation of China’s buses, 17% are Electric Vehicle buses. 90,000 of China’s registered buses are electric powered and 16 thousand are hybrid plug in powered.
This is far from the cop-out excuse boogey man that Matt Caravan is conjuring.
If Matt wants to come on board with the boogey man he is conjuring, the only thing that he has to decide on is what he is going to do with the stocking of coal import reduction present China gave back to Australia last Christmas.
This article was originally published on Dazza Egan Australia & China Watch Journo.
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