Clarification: China’s carbon dioxide emissions
Posted on 10 Mar 2016 in Commentary
On 4 March 2016, the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment and the ESRC Centre for Climate Change Economics and Policy at the London School of Economics and Political Science distributed a media release to journalists, under embargo for reporting on 7 March, about a new working paper on ‘China’s changing economy: implications for its carbon dioxide emissions’ by Fergus Green and Nicholas Stern.
The title for the release was ‘Chinese emissions may already have peaked’, and generated similar headlines in news reports around the world. This was a mistake because the release’s title conveyed the impression that this was the main finding of the paper and that the authors were less uncertain than they are that China’s annual emissions of carbon dioxide reached a peak in 2014.
An amended version of the media release has now been published on the websites of the Institute and Centre. We apologise for this mistake, particularly to the journalists and their audiences who were misled by the title of the media release.
Bob Ward is policy and communications director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment and the ESRC Centre for Climate Change Economics and Policy at the London School of Economics and Political Science.