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........

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