- Joined
- May 23, 2010
- Messages
- 185
- Reaction score
- 0
China takes lead over the US in climate-change measures
Bloomberg in Cancun
Dec 04, 2010
The United States pressed China to do more at climate-change talks in Copenhagen last year. Now, as the US falls short of its own goals, China may have gained more credibility in renewed negotiations by moving to clean up its energy industry.
"It used to be thought that China wouldn't act until the US took leadership," Mark Fulton, a managing director at Deutsche Bank Climate Change Advisers in New York, said in an interview.
"But unless I've missed something, China has already taken substantial action."
The US and China, the two biggest greenhouse-gas polluters, are in Cancun, Mexico, for the latest round of UN-led talks aimed at curtailing global warming. Envoys from 190 nations are seeking ways to show progress after last year's failure to craft a new, legally binding accord.
Since then, US President Barack Obama's effort to put through legislation that would cap carbon dioxide emissions died in Congress. China moved in the opposite direction, putting pollution cuts and energy efficiency into law and considering a CO2-trading system.
China attracted US$34.5 billion in renewable-energy investments last year, almost double the US figure of US$18.6 billion, according to the Bloomberg New Energy Finance website.
"The Chinese are important to work with because they are going to deploy faster, scale faster than we are in the US," Jim Rogers, chief executive officer of Charlotte, North Carolina-based Duke Energy said.
China's incentives for clean-energy development have been so abundant that the Obama administration has threatened to file a complaint with the World Trade Organisation branding the aid a violation of global trade rules.
"China is in a stronger negotiating position now than they were in Copenhagen because the perception is the US doesn't have its domestic act together," Alden Meyer, head of policy in Washington at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said. "The Chinese public believes they are doing a lot more on the ground than the US, and they don't think China should have to make any concessions."
Christiana Figueres, the UN diplomat leading this year's talks, last month praised China's initiative to spur wind and solar power and to cap emissions from industry, saying the nation has "outperformed".
China said it is studying a cap-and-trade system to reduce emissions and establish a market in allowances. The most populous country, with 1.3 billion people, is also considering a tax on carbon, Zhang Junkuo, head of development strategy at the State Council's development research centre recently said in Beijing.
Obama, who won House passage of a cap-and-trade measure last year only to see it stall in the Senate, said after Republican gains in last month's elections that a carbon market "was just one way of skinning the cat". He said he doubts such a measure can win passage until 2013 at the earliest. The Environmental Protection Agency is seeking to impose its own CO2 limits on power plants and factories.
"The US is a wounded elephant," Pa Ousman Jarju, Gambia's climate envoy, said on December 1. "The elephant had been moving very slowly, but now it's limping. We have to be realistic. We know there's nothing they can push here because of their domestic circumstances."
While environmentalists praise China's decision to embrace wind and solar energy, they also point out that the country's growing energy needs are being met mainly from the most polluting sources of energy.
"China is still facing huge challenges coming from both its heavy reliance on coal and reluctance from local governments to change," Ailun Yang, head of Greenpeace China's climate and energy campaign in Beijing, said.
Without a new treaty in sight, negotiators in Cancun are seeking step-by-step progress on topics such as deforestation, a US$100 billion fund to help vulnerable companies deal with climate change, emissions reductions and an international system to monitor, report and verify countries' actions.
US-China tensions over global warming escalated in the weeks before the Cancun gathering, from November 29 to December 10.
In October, Todd Stern, the lead US negotiator, accused China of reneging on commitments it made in the Copenhagen accord, a non-binding political pact reached last year after treaty talks collapsed. Su Wei, his Chinese counterpart, called the US a pig that primps in the mirror in spite of an ugly countenance.
Both sides are talking of conciliation now that they are in Cancun.
"Of course, we have different views and different positions, but in general both countries would very much like to promote the process forward for a successful outcome," Su said on Wednesday.
