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CLIMATE CHANGE-CHINA: Reluctance to Curb Emissions

Antoaneta Bezlova

BEIJING, Jul 22 2009 (IPS) - China has welcomed Obama administration’s efforts to lead a global movement to curb greenhouse gas emissions, but it has spawned concerns in Beijing that international pressure to cap emissions could mount, thus slowing the pace of economic growth.

"Low carbon, emission reductions and green policy have become the buzz words of the new political discourse," said an editorial in the China Business Journal last week.

"[However], the United States’ increasingly pro-active attitude in tacking climate change, is posing a great challenge for China, as the leader of the developing world, to respond in a similar way."

Under the previous Bush administration, which refused to consider action on climate change without binding targets and timetables for both developing and developed countries, China enjoyed the higher ground in the debate on climate change efforts.

As the only industrialised nation not to have ratified the Kyoto Protocol on climate change, U.S. was criticised for subverting global efforts to reverse global warming.

Until recently, U.S. ranked as the world’s largest overall greenhouse gas emitter, and China, repeatedly laid blame for global warming on its door, saying developed nations should shoulder the financial burden for fighting climate change. U.S. and China together account for 42 percent of emissions caused by human beings. Although per capita emissions of the U.S. are still the largest, China recently overtook the country to become the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases. Barack Obama assumed the US presidency after that, pledging to address the problem of climate change and prodding China to follow suit.

Last week, top-ranking American energy and commerce officials were in China seeking to bolster China-U.S. cooperation in areas of climate change and energy. Their mission was to try and cajole China to cap emissions, among other things.

In a speech at Tsinghua University, China’s top science university, America’s energy secretary Steven Chu said that unless greenhouse-gas emissions were curtailed, rising sea levels would displace more people in China than in any other country.

Commerce secretary Gary Locke, also insisted in a speech to the American Chamber of Commerce, that China shared a special responsibility with the Untied States to address global warming.

Under the Obama administration, the U.S. is willing to accept cuts in its greenhouse-gas emissions, which is a marked departure from the policy of the previous Bush administration. The U.S. is keen to get a similar commitment from China, but the latter is reluctant to do so. Beijing insists that China is a developing country cannot cap emissions by compromising on economic growth. Industrialised nations, it maintains, bear a greater responsibility in reducing emissions.

But in his speech, Locke asserted that Chinese arguments of development were "of no concern to Mother Nature".

"She will ignore attempts to explain the sins of the future by pointing out sins others made in the past," he said. Wang Ying, an environmental commentator, foresees mounting international demands on China to rise up to the challenge of matching U.S. efforts in combating global warming.

"It is true that China has low per capita carbon emissions and had no part in the emissions accumulated historically in comparison to developed countries. But China carries the ‘crown’ of the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases," she said. "In the new political environment, there would be an unprecedented pressure on China to respond with actions on par with those of the Untied States."

Indications of this pressure are already emerging. On June 26, the U.S. Congress passed the Clean Energy and Security Act, which empowers the government to penalise trading partners that fail to meet U.S. emissions standards.

"We welcome the recent positive changes in US policy on climate change," Qin Gang, the Chinese foreign ministry spokesman said of the legislation last week. But he added that China hopes the United States will shoulder the bigger responsibility in responding to climate change.

This week, commerce secretary Gary Locke suggested China and other developing nations must help "pay" for the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. In earlier statements, he admitted that a greater burden of this lay on the United States.

As the United States and other developed countries make costly commitments to address climate change, "developing countries like China must do the same," Locke told members of the US Manufacturing Council, a private sector advisory group.

"They've got to step up. They've got to pay for the cost of complying with global climate change. They've got to invest in energy efficiency and conservation, but also very definitive steps in reducing greenhouse gas emissions," Locke said.

While opposing binding limits on greenhouse gases, China’s environmental strategy to fight climate change has been defined by targets set for improving energy efficiency and investments in renewable energy. In 2007, China emerged as one of the leading global investors in greener technology like solar, wind, electric vehicles and grid technologies.

But Chinese experts have sounded apprehensive on pressing international demands for carbon capture and storage technology (CCS), arguing that this technology has not been tried out in any developed country and China should not be used as a "clean energy laboratory" for the developed world.

The 2007 meeting of the G8 group of industrialised nations specifically targeted China as the main potential recipient of the technology, which is intended to capture the carbon dioxide released from fossil fuel power plants and permanently store it away from the atmosphere.

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