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Chinese Vice Premier Zhang Gaoli speaks during the Climate Summit at the U.N. headquarters in New York on September 23, 2014. (Mike Segar/Courtesy Reuters)
Chinese Vice Premier Zhang Gaoli made news on Tuesday with his speech on climate change at the United Nations. My colleague and co-author Elizabeth Economy has an enlightening post on her blog, Asia Unbound, drilling down on the headlines. I’ve reposted it here.
At the UN Climate Summit this week in New York, Chinese Vice Premier Zhang Gaoli said it all: “China will make greater effort to more effectively address climate change;” announce further actions “as soon as we can;” and achieve “the peaking of total carbon dioxide emissions as early as possible.” According to one Western environmental NGO official, “China’s remarks at the Climate Summit go further than ever before. Vice Premier Zhang Gaoli’s announcements to strive to peak emissions ‘as early as possible’ is a welcome signal for the cooperative action we need for the Paris Agreement.” Other media outlets trumpeted: “China pledges to cut emissions at UN climate summit” and “China shifts stance on climate change.”
Really? In the face of such facts as China now emits more tonnes of carbon than the United States and European Union combined (not surprising since it consumes more coal than the entire world put together and its population is greater than that of the United States and EU combined) and, more surprisingly and less understandably, posts higher per capita emissions than the EU, Zhang’s statement seems to be an understatement. Indeed, it amounts to little more than Beijing will do as much as it can whenever it can, without providing any indication of what or when that might be. As Diplomat writer Shannon Tiezzi has noted, China’s biggest actual commitment was to pledge $6 million to promote south-south cooperation on climate change, by any measure a drop in the bucket. How is it that such a vague statement of intent can provoke such positive assessments? Without delving into the reasons that some observers are prone to jump the gun when it comes to applauding China for statements of intent as opposed to observable measures, the real question is whether there are any facts to back up such an optimistic outlook for China’s contribution to meeting the global climate change challenge.
There are indeed some positive signs. As journalist Matt Sheehan has pointed out, both Chinese coal imports and consumption dropped for the first time in a decade, and the country continues to increase the weight of nuclear, solar, wind, and natural gas in the country’s energy mix. The bad news is it isn’t clear whether the drop in coal is primarily from environmental measures to reduce coal consumption domestically (from setting coal caps and deploying tough new fines for coal miners that exceed national production levels) or from slowing Chinese economic growth; if the latter, coal consumption may well rebound if and when the Chinese economy does. Moreover, as Sheehan has reported, the drop in consumption was so slight that some analysts are reluctant to attribute any staying power to it. Also, as China shuts down power plants and coal mining in the eastern provinces, they are planning to move the plants and mines to the country’s western regions. Thus, while some of China’s major coal-related initiatives will do much to improve domestic air pollution in the coastal provinces, they won’t produce the same benefits for climate change.
More good news can be found in China’s efforts to launch a carbon trading exchange in four major cities and two provinces. In fact, Beijing has pledged that it will have a national emissions trading scheme twice the size that of the EU by 2020. Yet as a Stockholm Environment Institute study of China’s carbon emission trading plans detailed in 2012, many obstacles to a well-functioning system remain: measuring emissions more accurately, a legal infrastructure with clearly defined emission rights, permit allocation systems, trading rules, monitoring, and enforcement and accountability. The authors ask the fundamental question: “whether a carbon trading scheme—meant to be a strong market-based instrument—can function well without a mature free market economy.” Or as Australian National University climate expert Frank Jotzo has noted in reference to the Chinese system, “…an emissions trading scheme will be effective only if markets are allowed to work.” Already, concerns have been raised about the functioning of the pilot trading systems. Transparency over historic emissions data on which caps are based; the number of allowances granted; and even the names of companies getting the allowances are not always clear. As one carbon trading expert commented to the Financial Times about China’s carbon market: “It’s a black hole.”
Given the opacity and the complexity of China’s political economy, it is impossible to draw a straight line from Zhang Gaoli’s relatively weak call to climate action and anything that is occurring on the ground in China today. There are three stages to understanding Chinese policy on climate change—or on anything else for that matter: statement of intent, policy design, and policy implementation. The important thing to remember, however, is that in the end, only the last matters.
- Elizabeth Economy
If the world’s biggest polluter doesn’t radically reduce the amount of coal it burns, nothing anyone does to stabilize the climate will matter. Inside the slow, frustrating — and maybe even hopeful — struggle to find a new way forward.
For nearly a decade, the U.S. and China, the two most powerful nations on the planet, have met every year to talk about how to run the world together. When the talks began in 2006, they focused on issues like currency-exchange rates, trade barriers and China’s never-ending disputes with Taiwan. In 2009, shortly after Obama’s inauguration, the U.S. pushed to add climate change to the mix, hoping that a better understanding between the U.S. and China would lead to a better deal at the Copenhagen climate summit that year. (It didn’t help – mistrust between the countries was a large part of the reason why the talks imploded.)
This year’s U.S. delegation includes many of the administration’s most influential climate hawks – Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz, top climate negotiator Todd Stern and John Podesta, counselor to Obama, who has become the administration’s de facto point man for climate policy. This is the diplomatic equivalent of a full-court press. In the past couple of years, Obama has made some important moves, including investing billions in clean energy, jacking up vehicle-efficiency standards and proposing rules to limit pollution from U.S. coal plants. But climate change is a global issue. Unless the West can persuade other countries to take climate action seriously, nothing any single nation does is going to matter much when it comes to solving the problem.
Except, that is, for China. The blunt truth is that what China decides to do in the next decade will likely determine whether or not mankind can halt – or at least ameliorate – global warming. The view among a number of prominent climate scientists is that if China’s emissions peak around 2025, we may – just barely – have a shot at stabilizing the climate before all hell breaks loose. But the Chinese have resisted international pressure to curb their emissions. For years, they have used the argument that they are poor, the West is rich, and that the high levels of carbon in the atmosphere were caused by America’s and Europe’s 200-year-long fossilfuel binge.
Climate change is your problem, they argued – you deal with it. But that logic doesn’t hold anymore. China is set to become the largest economy in the world this year, and in 2006, it passed the U.S. as the planet’s largest carbon polluter. China now dumps 10 billion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere every year. That number is expected to grow to 15 billion tons by 2030, dwarfing the pollution of the rest of the world. If that happens, then the chances that the world will cut carbon pollution quickly enough to avert dangerous climate change.
Juan Bruno
Dvinz Oil & Gas,S.A
“After You, My Dear Alphonse,”