A profound transformation of China’s energy system is required to achieve carbon neutrality. Here, we couple Monte Carlo analysis with a bottom-up energy-environment-economy model to generate 3,000 cases with different carbon peak times, technological evolution pathways and cumulative carbon budgets. The results show that if emissions peak in 2025, the carbon neutrality goal calls for a 45–62% electrification rate, 47–78% renewable energy in primary energy supply, 5.2–7.9 TW of solar and wind power, 1.5–2.7 PWh of energy storage usage and 64–1,649 MtCO2 of negative emissions, and synergistically reducing approximately 80% of local air pollutants compared to the present level in 2050. The emission peak time and cumulative carbon budget have significant impacts on the decarbonization pathways, technology choices, and transition costs. Early peaking reduces welfare losses and prevents overreliance on carbon removal technologies. Technology breakthroughs, production and consumption pattern changes, and policy enhancement are urgently required to achieve carbon neutrality.
Current
National Determined Contributions require strengthening
to achieve the 2-degree target set in the Paris Agreement. Here, we
contrast two mitigation effort strengthening ideas: the “burden-sharing”
principle, which requires each region to meet the mitigation goal
through domestic mitigation with no international cooperation, and
the cooperation focused “cost effective conditional-enhancing”
principle, which combines domestic mitigation with carbon trading
and low-carbon investment transfer. By applying a burden-sharing model
covering several equity principles, we analyze the 2030 mitigation
burden for each region, then the energy system model generates the
results for the carbon trade and the investment transfer for the conditional-enhancing
plan, and an air pollution cobenefit model is used to analyze the
cobenefit on air quality and public health. Here, we show that the
conditional-enhancing plan leads to an international carbon trading
volume of 339.2 billion USD per year and reduces the marginal mitigation
cost of the quota-purchase regions by 25%–32%. Furthermore,
the international cooperation incentivizes a faster and deeper decarbonization
in developing and emerging regions, raising the air pollution health
cobenefits by 18% to 731,000 avoided premature deaths annually compared
to the “burden-sharing” principle, amounting to a reduction
in the life value loss of 131 billion dollars per year.
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