The data on carbon emissions in 2023 is only just in, but we can already predict where things will go this year.

Global greenhouse pollution hit a new record and increased 1.1 per cent last year, the International Energy Agency reported last week. That was almost entirely a China story. Had the country held its carbon budget steady — or reduced it, in the manner of fellow high-income countries whose pollution is now at a 50-year low — then the world’s climate footprint would have shrunk by about 155 million metric tonnes, instead of growing by 410 million tonnes.

China’s push for growth is bad news for the environment. Credit: AP

If you want to know how this year is shaping up, Beijing’s National People’s Congress provided a sneak peek. Its 5 per cent growth target announced doesn’t absolutely guarantee that global emissions will rise again in 2024. But it makes the path to avoiding that fate extraordinarily narrow.

That’s because a country’s greenhouse footprint can be boiled down to three factors: its economic growth, the energy intensity of that growth, and the carbon intensity of that energy. On all three, China performs dismally outside the norm — and the dirigiste policymaking typified by the NPC is the major culprit.

One way of looking at the nexus between pollution and economic growth is to ask how many tonnes of greenhouse gases it takes to produce a million dollars of economic output. Despite decades of gradual improvement, that figure is about 462 tonnes in China — close to double the 246 tonnes in the US and almost four times the 137 tonnes in the European Union.

Some of that is just a matter of development. Though China is on the brink of rich-country levels of gross domestic product per person, it was a low-income nation just over a generation ago. Climbing the development ladder — with all the steel mills, cement plants, factories, roads, cars and airplanes it requires — consumes a lot of carbon. Even so, China’s figure is 60 per cent more than the 284 tonnes in India, which is roughly the global average. It’s a clear outlier.

Put those numbers together with the GDP growth target, and we can already see that a pollution peak won’t come this year unless China’s economy gets far more efficient at turning carbon into growth.

Such a path seems unlikely. China doesn’t target its carbon intensity directly, but the closely related measure for energy intensity just got downgraded below what many analysts were expecting. After missing the government’s objective of a 2 per cent improvement last year, the ambition for 2024 announced Tuesday is just 2.5 per cent — significantly weaker than the 4 per cent tightening that ANZ Group Holdings had predicted.