China About to Become Biggest CO2 Emitter: IEA

By REUTERS | The New York Times
April 18, 2007

LONDON (Reuters) - China will overtake the United States as the world's biggest emitter of heat-trapping carbon dioxide (CO2) either this year or next, the International Energy Agency said on Wednesday.

The estimate is much firmer than the IEA's previous forecast, last November, that on current trends China would overtake the United States before 2010.

``Either this year or next year,'' IEA Chief Economist Fatih Birol told Reuters, in answer to the question of when China would overtake the United States.

The IEA is energy adviser to 26 rich nations and Birol is a key author of the Paris-based agency's annual World Energy Outlook report.

China is set to become the world's top carbon emitter just as serious talks start to extend the U.N.-sponsored Kyoto Protocol on global warming beyond 2012, potentially heaping pressure on Beijing to take more action on climate change.

A copy of a so-far unpublished Chinese government global warming report, seen by Reuters, rejects binding caps on carbon emissions until the country's modernization, by the middle of this century, opting instead to brake emissions growth.

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