Exclusive | German climate envoy urges China to look beyond coal for energy-secure future
- Germany learned the hard way about the need for renewable supplies and efficiency, Jennifer Morgan says
- The two countries could build on their long history of collaboration on energy and climate change, she says
Jennifer Morgan, Germany’s state secretary and special envoy for international climate action, told the South China Morning Post in an exclusive interview that she was concerned about China’s coal plant development.
“We are concerned. We need to think about energy security and climate security together now,” she said in the interview last month. “We hope China would move more into other ways of ensuring its energy security rather than going for coal.”
“That’s something that we’ve learned very much the hard way in the last year with the Russian war of aggression. As we have phased out all of our imports of Russian fossil fuels, our best energy security measure is to build out renewables … and also [energy] efficiency.”
01:40
‘Climate time bomb ticking’: UN chief says carbon emissions must be urgently cut
China embarked on a massive expansion of its coal-fired power capacity following power outages across the country in 2021 and 2022 that were mostly caused by economic and weather-related factors.