The most ambitious climate goal the world’s ever seen now has a road map for how to arrive at it.
One of China’s top climate research institutes on Sunday laid out a plan of increasing renewable and nuclear energy and completely phasing out coal power. It’s the first blueprint from a group that works closely with the government showing how the country might become carbon neutral by 2060, a goal laid out by President Xi Jinping last week in a speech to the United Nations.
The plan, from Tsinghua University’s Institute of Energy, Environment and Economy, entails a more gradual transition over the next decade and a half, with a rapid acceleration after 2035. The institute works closely with the Ministry of Ecology and Environment on projecting long term goals. It also works with a separate climate research institute at Tsinghua run by Xie Zhenhua, who led China’s climate policies and represented the country in international climate negotiations for more than 10 years.