In climate world, something that once seemed almost unthinkable may now be happening. Preliminary data shows that while global carbon emissions are continuing to rise, China’s emissions may already be peaking — the longtime climate villain turning the corner on carbon before the planet as a whole does.

在气候世界里，一件曾经被认为几乎无法想象的事可能正在发生。初步数据显示，尽管全球碳排放仍在上升，中国的排放可能已经达峰——长期以来的气候大反派，如今先于全球一步，扭转了排放趋势。

Forecasts like these are not perfectly reliable, but already China has completely rewritten the global green transition story. You may be familiar with the broad strokes of that story: that thanks to several decades of mind-boggling declines in the cost of solar, wind and battery technology, a new wave of climate advocacy and dramatically more policy support, the rollout of various green energy technologies is tracing an astonishing exponential curve upward, each year making a mockery of cautious projections from legacy industry analysts.

像这样的预测并不完全可靠，但全球绿色转型故事已经被中国彻底改写。这个故事的大致情节你可能已经了解了：凭借数十年来太阳能、风能和电池技术成本以令人咋舌的速度下降，以及新一轮的气候倡议和大幅增加的政策支持，各类绿色能源技术正在沿着一条惊人的指数曲线上升，每一年的进展都让那些守旧的产业分析人士的谨慎预测沦为笑柄。

But while this is often hailed as a global success, one country has dominated recent progress. When you look at the world outside of China, those eye-popping global curves flatten out considerably — green energy is still moving in the right direction, but much more slowly.

这一点时常被作为一项全球成功来赞颂，但近年的进步主要来自一个国家。把中国排除在世界之外，那让人瞠目结舌的上升曲线就平缓了许多——绿色能源仍然走在正确的方向上，只是速度要慢很多。

Consider solar power, which is presently dominating the global green transition and giving the world its feel-good story. In 2023, the world including China installed 425 gigawatts of new solar power; the world without China installed only 162 gigawatts. China accounted for 263 gigawatts; the United States accounted for just 33. As recently as 2019, China was installing about one-quarter of global solar capacity additions; last year, it managed 62 percent more than the rest of the world combined. Over those same five years, China grew its amount of new added capacity more than eight times over; the world without China didn’t even double its rate.

以太阳能为例，作为当前全球绿色转型的主导力量，太阳能给了世界一个自我安慰的故事。2023年，包括中国在内的全球太阳能装机容量达425吉瓦；除中国之外的世界只有162吉瓦。中国占了263吉瓦；美国只有33吉瓦。就在2019年的时候，中国的装机容量还是全球总量的四分之一左右；去年，它的装机容量已经比除它之外的全世界总量多出62%。同样经过这五年，中国的新增装机已经增长了八倍以上；如果不算中国，全世界增幅还不到一倍。

Take China out of these figures and the numbers look much less impressive: 90 gigawatts installed in 2019, 93 in 2020, 100 in 2021, 133 in 2022 and 162 in 2023. There has been progress outside of China — a 62 percent increase in new capacity between 2021 and 2023. But in China the increase was 317 percent.

一旦排除中国，数字就显得没那么值得赞叹了：从2019年到2023年，每年的新增装机容量依次为90、93、100、133和162吉瓦。中国之外的世界并非没有进步——从2021年到2023年，新增容量增加了62%。但中国的增长是317%。

The pattern extends beyond solar. According to one recent estimate, nearly two-thirds of all big solar and wind plants being built globally this year are in China, which is deploying green energy at more than eight times the scale of any other country in the world. Together, all the Group of 7 powers — the United States, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and Britain — managed barely one-quarter as many new installations in 2023 as did China. In 2023, China installed 74 gigawatts of new wind capacity; the rest of the world installed 43 gigawatts, and the United States just 6. In 2023, 8.1 million electric vehicles were sold in China, compared to 5.6 million everywhere else in the world and 1.4 million in America.

不只是太阳能。据最近的一项估算，今年全球建造的大型太阳能和风能发电场有近三分之二在中国，其绿色能源部署规模是世界其它地方的八倍以上。七国集团——美国、加拿大、法国、德国、意大利、日本和英国——加起来，2023年的新增装机容量勉强达到中国的四分之一。2023年中国新增风电容量74吉瓦；世界其它地方总和为43吉瓦，美国只有6吉瓦。2023年，中国售出电动汽车810万辆，世界其它地方是560万辆，其中美国140万辆。

There are encouraging stories elsewhere, to be sure. (In the first six months of 2024, Europe produced more electricity from wind and solar than from fossil fuels, for instance, and rooftop solar increased by 349 percent in South Africa in just over a year.) But to the extent that the rest of the world is decarbonizing, China is helping power those transitions, too. In 2022, roughly 90 percent of the solar wafers and solar cells produced in the world were Chinese — by some measures more than twice as many as the rest of the world was even ready to install. Last year, more than 60 percent of the world’s wind turbines were manufactured in China and 60 percent of the world’s E.V. sales came from China. In 2004, the American share of global solar manufacturing was 13 percent, but by 2023, it had fallen below 1 percent. China’s share is now 80 percent; it had been just 1 percent.

当然，其它地方也有令人鼓舞的故事。（例如2024年前六个月，欧洲的风能和太阳能发电量超过了化石燃料，南非的屋顶太阳能在一年多里增加了349%。）然而从世界其它地方的脱碳进展来看，转型背后也有中国的推动。2022年，中国生产了全球约90%的太阳能硅片和电池——根据一些测算，这个产量是世界其它地方计划安装的总量的两倍以上。去年，全世界超过60%的风力涡轮机是中国生产的，售出的电动汽车60%来自中国。2004年，美国在全球太阳能生产中的份额是13%，到了2023年已经不zu61%。中国的份额现在是80%，曾经只有1%。

Just five years ago, it was commonplace to hear Western climate diplomats complain that even the most miraculous decarbonization in the wealthy world would be worth little if the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, whose country single-handedly produces nearly a third of all emissions, didn’t play ball. Even today, you hear nominally climate-conscious people lament the fact that warming is a worldwide problem with domestic solutions, postulating that the mismatch of local costs and global benefits will disincentivize bad or reluctant climate actors, and sometimes arguing that these dynamics suggest we should slow our roll, as well.

也就在五年前，西方的气候外交官还经常发牢骚，说即使富有的国家实现奇迹般的脱碳，只要中国的习近平主席不配合，那也是白搭，毕竟这一个国家就产生了将近三分之一的排放。直到今天还有一些号称有气候意识的人在哀叹，全球变暖是一个只能由各国去解决的全球问题，这是在假定，地方成本和全球收益之间的不匹配会让那些不良的、不积极的行为者失去解决问题的动力，有的还说，既然存在这样的情况，我们也应该放慢脚步。

In fact, the competitive logic is now something like the opposite. By some measures, our peer countries and natural allies in Europe are all considerably farther along in their transitions than the United States. And our major geopolitical and geoeconomic rival is not slow-walking its decarbonization, but somewhat leaving the rest of the world in the dust. That doesn’t mean China has solved the world’s climate problem for us — or even its own, given the scale of its ongoing carbon emissions — just that “there is not one single energy transition but a series of regional transitions of widely varying form, pace and scope,” as Brett Christophers argued recently in The Financial Times. “There is an obfuscation involved in talking about ‘the global,’” Adam Tooze has written, “when, in fact, there is one country that dominates the entire dynamic of the energy transition: China.”

事实上，竞争的逻辑如今正好反过来。从某些方面看，一些与我们接近的国家以及欧洲的那些理所当然的盟友在转型的进度上都领先美国不少。我们的主要地缘政治和地缘经济对手在脱碳的路上不但没有懈怠，还把全世界都甩在了身后。这不等于说中国已经帮我们解决了世界的气候问题——甚至自己的问题也没解决，毕竟到它目前的碳排放水平仍然很高——只是如布雷特·克里斯托夫斯在《金融时报》上的文章所说，“能源转型并非单一的进程，而是一系列的地区转型，有着各不相同的形式、步调和广度。”“当我们在谈论‘全球’的时候，是存在一种混淆的，”亚当·图兹写道，“因为事实上，在整个能源转型动态里，有一个国家是占据绝对优势的，那就是中国。”

A decade ago, an awful lot of intellectual and diplomatic energy was spent on the strategic question of how the United States and its allies might encourage China, then as now the world’s biggest emitter, to join us in the race to decarbonize. Today, U.S. policymakers are throwing up green-tech tariffs to protect American clean-energy industries — a sign that, measuring by price point, we are already losing that race, in addition to losing it as measured by rate of deployment.

十年前，美国及其盟友将大量的知识和外交精力花在了一个战略问题上，即如何鼓励中国加入到我们的脱碳竞赛中，无论是当时还是现在，这个国家都是全球最大的温室气体排放国。然而，今天的美国政策制定者正在提高绿色技术关税以保护美国的清洁能源行业——这表明，从价格角度来看，我们已经输掉了这场竞赛，此外，从部署速度来看，我们同样也处于落后。

China’s massive investments in green tech are both strategic stimulus for a flagging economy in the aftermath of a real-estate bubble and an imperial-scale bet on the importance of clean energy to prosperity and power in the 21st century. A similar logic guides green investment elsewhere, including in the United States, where the Inflation Reduction Act has been called “the world’s largest-ever investment in clean energy technologies.” But if this is a race, China has a commanding lead.

中国在绿色科技领域的大规模投资既是对房地产泡沫后萎靡不振的经济的战略刺激，也是在举一国之力押注21世纪清洁能源对繁荣与权力的重要性。类似的逻辑也指导着其他地方的绿色投资，包括美国——《通货膨胀削减法案》被称为“世界上有史以来最大的清洁能源技术投资”。但如果这是一场比赛，中国遥遥领先。

To measure instead by emissions, of course, yields a somewhat different picture. China today produces almost three times as much carbon as the United States, which is the world’s second-worst climate polluter, and towers even more dramatically above the other countries of the world in any tally of present-day damage to the future climate of the planet. But in certain ways this makes China’s green boom even more impressive: The most carbon-hungry economy in world history, during a period of slowing growth short of global “high-income” status, is wagering an enormous amount of its future on nascent energy technologies— and racing well ahead of the global promises it has made about the speed of its own transition. This year, for instance, China hit its 2030 target for total renewable energy six full years early. In the United States, we seem perhaps more focused on artificial intelligence.

当然，如果用排放量来衡量，结果会有些不同。如今，中国的碳排放量是美国的将近三倍，而美国是世界上第二大气候污染国，在当今对地球未来气候造成的损害方面，中国更是比世界上其他国家都要大。但在某种程度上，这让中国的绿色繁荣更加令人印象深刻：作为世界历史上最耗碳的经济体，在经济增长放缓、尚未跻身全球“高收入”行列的时期，中国正将其未来的巨大赌注押在新兴的能源技术上，并且远远超过了它在转型速度上对全球做出的承诺。例如，今年中国提前整整六年实现了2030年可再生能源总量的目标。在美国，我们似乎更关注人工智能。

You can measure the staggering impact in several ways. Electricity is the currency of the global transition, so to speak, and, last year, the total net growth in global electricity demand was 627 terawatt hours, according to Ember; China on its own added 606 terawatt hours. (A terawatt is one trillion watts.)

你可以用几种方式来衡量这种惊人的影响。可以说，电力是全球转型的货币，根据Ember的数据，去年全球电力需求的净增长总量为627太瓦时；仅仅中国就增加了606太瓦时。（1太瓦等于1万亿瓦。）

Or you can look at what the International Energy Agency calls “avoided emissions” — one way of measuring the impact of new renewables. New solar additions in China accounted for 619 megatons of annual avoided emissions, six times as much as the United States.

或者可以看看国际能源机构所谓的“避免排放”——这是衡量新可再生能源影响的一种方法。中国新增的太阳能每年减少的排放量为6.19亿吨，是美国的六倍。

These gains partly reflect how dirty China’s legacy energy mix is, of course, since replacing coal reduces more emissions than replacing gas. Nevertheless the contrasts are eye-popping. New wind capacity built in China “avoided” 487 megatons of emissions, according to the I.E.A., while all the wind power elsewhere in the world only cut carbon by 343 megatons. In China, electric cars averted 22 megatons of emissions, more than in the United States (15 megatons), the European Union (14 megatons), Britain (3 megatons) and three times as much as new E.V.s in the rest of the world (7 megatons). Nuclear is a slightly more even race, but even there China avoided more emissions (74 megatons) than South Korea (20 megatons), the United Arab Emirates (15 megatons), the European Union (9 megatons) and the rest of the world (44 megatons).

当然，这些进展在一定程度上反映了中国传统能源结构的污染程度，因为取代煤炭比取代天然气能减少更多的排放。尽管如此，这种反差还是令人瞠目。根据国际能源署的数据，中国新建的风电容量“避免”了4.87兆吨的排放，而世界其他地方的风力发电只减少了3.43兆吨的排放。在中国，电动汽车减少了2200万吨的排放量，超过了美国（1500万吨）、欧盟（1400万吨）和英国（300万吨），是世界其他地区新电动汽车减排（700万吨）的三倍。核电方面的差距相对较小，但即使在这方面，中国避免的排放量（7400万吨）也比韩国（2000万吨）、阿拉伯联合酋长国（1500万吨）、欧盟（900万吨）和世界其它地区（4400万吨）要多。

You can also look at the simple scale of what they are building. China has devoted more than twice as much land to solar plants as the United States has.

只需看看他们正在建造的规模。中国用于太阳能发电的土地面积是美国的两倍多。

What does all this add up to? What does it mean to place China at the incontrovertible center of any story about, or analysis of, the green transition?

这一切意味着什么？在任何有关绿色转型的报道或分析中，将中国置于无可争议的中心位置意味着什么？

The question is an enormous one, perhaps as large as geopolitics and as capacious as the scope of possible global futures. But in the short run, at least, two basic points stand out to me.

这是一个重大的问题，也许与地缘政治一样大，与全球未来可能性一样广阔。但至少在短期内，我认为有两个基本点值得注意。

The first is that the energy transition is, at present, to a large degree, a Chinese project. There is progress being made around the world, but the gap between China and everybody else is much larger and more intimidating than is widely acknowledged, and the global story looks much less optimistic once you set China aside — which is, in some ways, precisely what America is trying to do by engaging in a green-tech trade war.

首先，能源转型目前在很大程度上是一个中国项目。世界各地都在取得进步，但中国与其他所有国家之间的差距比人们普遍认为的要大得多，也更令人生畏，一旦你把中国撇在一边，全球的情况看起来就不那么乐观了——而在某种程度上，美国发动的绿色科技贸易战正是想把中国撇在一边。

Much of the argument for those tariffs has concerned the challenge of Chinese subsidy and “overcapacity” — and what the United States and its allies might do, if anything, to enable us to properly compete with a green economy producing today twice as many solar panels as the world has demand for, as well as an E.V. company taking over the world while mostly posting losses. But another aspect of the imbalance is perhaps more worrying, at least for those of us concerned about the pace of decarbonization: that China might back off, reducing its support for green industry in much the way that it purposefully deflated its own real-estate bubble, somewhat idling the engine of the global green transition and leaving the rest of us in the lurch.

支持征收这些关税的大部分论据主要涉及中国补贴和“产能过剩”的挑战，乃至美国及其盟友可能采取的措施（如果有的话），以使我们能够与那个太阳能电池板产量是全球需求量两倍的绿色经济体，还有那个虽然席卷全球但基本仍在亏损状态的电动汽车公司展开公平的竞争。但这种不平衡的另一方面或许更令人担忧，至少对我们这些关心脱碳速度的人来说是这样：中国可能会后退，减少对绿色产业的支持，就像它有意地缩小自己的房地产泡沫一样，从而在某种程度上让全球绿色转型的引擎空转，让我们其他人陷入困境。