China cooks the carbon accounting books by 400 million tons
By Jo Nova
We’re facing the sixth mass extinction but carbon accounting games are a performance art and almost no one cares that the largest emitter on Earth has gaping holes in their numbers.
One reader in The Wall Street Journal, pointed out that The Onion saw this coming years ago:
“China Vows to Begin Aggressively Falsifying Air Pollution Numbers.” (2014)
We live in an era where satire became the news.
The Paris Agreement allows everyone to set their own targets, and to define their own terms (and retrospectively as well). So China decided it would count “carbon intensity”, rather than carbon output. But it didn’t define carbon intensity. Normally it means the amount of CO2 emitted per unit GDP — which would work well for China with its rapidly growing economy. But something else is going on.
In the last five years China had promised to cut emissions by 18%, but all the official statistics suggested it was only getting 12% of the way there. Then a miracle happened and suddenly China leapt to a 17.7% reduction, just in the nick of time.
The Ecoworriers team at Carbon Brief are probably the only ones who do care and they drilled through all the detail. But being as generous as they can, even they can’t explain where 380 megatons went.
https://joannenova.com.au/2026/06/china-cooks-the-carbon-accounting-books/
