climate change: China’s contribution
[She’ll be on my radio show next week along with the guest editor of
The Nation’s climate issue, Christian Parenti.]
The Nation - May 7, 2007 http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070507/economy
China vs. Earth Elizabeth Economy
The message is clear: Shanghai under water, Tibetan glaciers
disappearing, crop yields in precipitous decline, epidemics flaring.
These are just some of the dire consequences that Chinese scientists
predict for their country this century if current climate change is
not addressed. Yet China’s leaders pay about as much attention to the
issue as does George W. Bush. In fact, a report issued last year by
the Climate Action Network-Europe ranks China fifty-fourth out of
fifty-six countries for its climate change response, just behind the
United States and ahead only of Malaysia and Saudi Arabia.
Beijing knows the costs of inaction: A recent major official study on
climate change predicts up to a 37 percent decline in China’s wheat,
rice and corn yields in the second half of the century. Precipitation
may decline by as much as 30 percent in three of China’s seven major
river regions: the Huai, Liao and Hai. The Yellow and Yangtze rivers,
which support the richest agricultural regions of the country and
derive much of their water from Tibetan glaciers, will initially
experience floods and then drought as the glaciers melt.
Moreover, a one-meter rise in sea level will submerge an area the
size of Portugal along China’s eastern seaboard–home to more than
half the country’s population and 60 percent of its economic output.
Already climate change-related extreme weather is taking its toll: In
2006 such disasters cost China more than $25 billion in damage.
Finally, a study by Shanghai-based researcher Wen Jiahong suggests
that the lethal H5N1 virus will spread as climate change shifts the
habitats and migratory patterns of birds.
Yet China’s leaders show little inclination to move aggressively to
forestall such calamities. As a result of China’s reliance on coal to
fuel its economy, its emissions of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide
have tripled over the past thirty years and are now second only to
those of the United States. In late 2006 the International Energy
Agency predicted that China would surpass the United States as the
largest contributor of CO2 by 2009, a full decade earlier than
anticipated. China already uses more coal than the United States, the
European Union and Japan combined and is the world’s second-largest
consumer of oil after the United States. (India, which lags well
behind China in its overall consumption of coal, is nonetheless on
track to become a major CO2 contributor over the next ten years and
is already the fifth-largest contributor of greenhouse gases globally.)
China’s development strategy suggests that little will change in the
foreseeable future. With plans on the books to urbanize half the
Chinese population by 2020, energy consumption will soar. City
residents in China use 250 percent more power than their rural
counterparts. And China’s love affair with the private car is set to
rival that of the United States. A conservative estimate by the Asian
Development Bank predicts that the number of cars in China could
increase by fifteen times present levels over the next thirty years,
more than tripling CO2 emissions.
If China’s development trajectory continues as planned, its increase
in greenhouse gas emissions will likely exceed that of all
industrialized countries combined over the next twenty-five years,
surpassing by five times the reduction in such emissions that the
Kyoto Protocol sought. In short, it’s a nightmarishly bad picture.
It would be unfair, however, to characterize China as doing nothing
to address climate change. The leadership’s worries about both energy
security and domestic air pollution–five of the world’s ten most
polluted cities are in China–are propelling them to set bold targets
for reshaping their energy mix and enhancing energy efficiency.
The Chinese government has called for renewable energy to provide 10
percent of the nation’s power by 2010 and 15 percent by 2020. Key
state-owned enterprises and provincial governors must make 20 percent
reductions in their energy intensity (that is, energy consumed per
unit of GDP) over the next three years. On that front there is a lot
of room for improvement: China’s buildings consume 250 percent more
energy than buildings in other countries with comparable climates.
Beijing has responded with a raft of tough new building codes for
energy efficiency. Much like the United States, cities and provinces
are now taking matters into their own hands. Shenzhen, for example,
has passed a regulation that solar power be used to supply hot water
in all new residential buildings under twelve stories.
Already there is some success. With the assistance of the US-based
Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), China built its first LEED
(Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) certified building.
Fittingly, the building houses the Ministry of Science and
Technology, in Beijing. Ten stories tall, it uses 70 percent less
energy than similar buildings and saves 10,000 tons of water annually
through rainwater collection. NRDC energy expert Robert Watson, one
of the chief architects of the project, claims that if every new
nonresidential building in China matched this one, the electricity
savings would equal the amount of energy provided by the Three Gorges
Dam.
But China is littered with well-intended demonstration projects that
go nowhere. If these new regulations are to have an impact, Beijing’s
tough rhetoric must be matched by real enforcement, a task that has
proved elusive in the past. In 2002 the Chinese government pledged to
cut sulfur dioxide 10 percent by 2005. (SO2 is not a greenhouse gas
but is a noxious byproduct of coal power that causes acid rain and
urban smog; getting rid of it is a good idea.) But SO2 emissions have
increased 27 percent. From all accounts, few if any of the coal-fired
power plants that China is bringing online almost every week embrace
state-of-the-art clean technology. Moreover, Beijing has already
missed its first-year target for the 2006-10 plan to increase the
energy efficiency of industry.
Why can’t this supposed command economy impose solutions if its
leadership sees a problem? There are several reasons behind China’s
consistent failure to meet environmental goals.
First, the central government in Beijing actually has little on-the-
ground enforcement capability in the provinces. Local environmental
protection officials report to and are beholden to local government
officials, not to the State Environmental Protection Administration
in Beijing. One of the West’s great misconceptions is that what
Beijing says goes. In fact, local officials are often in cahoots with
factory managers and allow industry to pollute well above legal
limits–either because the officials have a financial stake in the
enterprise or because they are afraid that closing a factory, or
making it more expensive to operate, will diminish local employment
and lead to social unrest, which is now a very serious problem all
across China.
In other cases, local officials want to do the right thing but are
too weak in the face of powerful enterprise managers.
At root, however, China’s lax environmental enforcement results from
Beijing’s failure to create a system of green-oriented incentives and
penalties. Pricing of natural resources, pollution levies and
promotion incentives for officials should all be geared toward
environmental protection. Instead, growth at all costs is the guiding
logic. Moreover, China’s leaders are afraid to unleash civil society,
in the form of the media, the legal system and NGOs, to help hold
local officials accountable for wrongdoing. Already there are tens of
thousands of mass demonstrations over environmental pollution every
year. Officials fear that opposition demands will escalate out of
control, unleashing a far more powerful push for broader political
reform. So the government relies on its old methods, limiting
transparency, accountability and free expression.
On the international stage, China faces pressure and incentives to
become more environmentally responsible. Beijing’s interest in
promoting energy efficiency and the development of renewable energy
resources–as well as a desire to be perceived as a constructive
global actor–drove China’s ratification of the Kyoto Protocol. And
China has become an active player in the Protocol’s Clean Development
Mechanism (CDM), tapping into opportunities for technology transfer
and international investment. China already has some seventy CDM
projects under way–well over half of which supply foreign investment
and/or technology for renewable energy projects. According to an
Asian Development Bank expert, China could generate an annual revenue
stream of more than $2 billion by participating in externally funded
CDM projects.
But without more substantial commitment to meet real targets for
radical emissions reductions, China’s greenhouse contributions will
overwhelm its best efforts.
If there is a meaningful Chinese discussion about tackling climate
change, it takes place largely behind closed doors, well out of sight
of foreigners. Perhaps recent natural disasters will motivate Chinese
leaders: Over just the past year China has suffered floods in the
east that have affected more than 10 million people, while drought
this spring left 13 million people and 12 million farm animals
without enough drinking water.
The Communist Party’s argument over the past fifteen years has been:
Since China came late to the industrialization game, the core
economies, with their significantly greater historical greenhouse gas
contributions, must pay for a global transformation away from fossil
fuels. Now it is China’s turn to develop, so deal with it.
“Development is the first urgent task,” said Qin Dahe, a member of
the Chinese Academy of Sciences and co-chair of the United Nations
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. “It’s a firm principle
and, moreover, we need good and fast development. Only then will we
be able to step by step solve the problem” of climate change. Chinese
officials are also quick to point out that on a per capita basis,
China’s greenhouse gas emissions are dwarfed by those of the
developed countries: Per capita discharge is only 61 percent of the
world’s average and 21 percent of that of OECD (Organization for
Economic Co-operation and Development) countries.
A more subtle indication of how China’s leaders understand the global
climate change regime is revealed by the regulatory framework China
has established for the Kyoto-related CDM projects. In essence,
Beijing places a higher priority on projects that contribute to the
development of the economy and transfer technology to China than on
projects that make reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.
When growth and green can be accomplished together, the Chinese
government embraces environmentalism. For example, it actively
discriminates in favor of CDM proposals that transfer technology and
advance the country’s capacity in renewables, energy efficiency and
methane recovery. But reforestation projects or projects that propose
to reduce emissions of HFC-23–a greenhouse gas with global warming
potential more than 11,000 times that of CO2–are discouraged because
they do not involve enough capital or provide technology transfer.
Working within these confines, the Kyoto-related CDM framework offers
important ways for OECD countries to nudge China away from fossil fuels.
Paradoxically, another reason climate change is not a bigger issue in
China has to do with local pollution. Anyone who has visited an
inland Chinese city knows how terrifyingly bad the air is. Chinese
media are replete with horrifying statistics: An estimated 400,000
people die prematurely from respiratory diseases related to air
pollution each year; one-quarter of China’s land is desert, and the
desert is advancing at the rate of 1,900 square miles per year,
producing tens of thousands of environmental migrants; and in China’s
north and west, severe and growing water scarcity is impinging on
economic growth, limiting agricultural and industrial output. As a
result even the burgeoning environmental nongovernmental sector in
China discusses climate change only as an afterthought. Strangely,
few outside the scientific community make the connection that climate
change may be exacerbating and exacerbated by these “domestic” problems.
The world’s most industrialized countries started the climate crisis,
but China might well finish the job. Not having China on board for a
more stringent post-Kyoto accord is simply not an option.
In late April the Chinese government is expected to release a
national plan on global climate change. From all accounts, the
document will reinforce the government’s commitment to energy
efficiency and renewables while also setting forth prevention
policies for natural disasters. What it will not do, unsurprisingly,
is embrace any targets or timetables for greenhouse gas emission
reductions. For that to happen, two things are necessary. First, the
United States, preferably with Australia and India in tow, must agree
to aggressive emission reductions, perhaps along the lines currently
pursued by California. Without a strong US commitment, the
international community has no credibility in pressuring the Chinese.
Second, OECD countries will have to be far more generous and
comprehensive in compensating China in its struggle to enforce
tougher energy efficiency and renewable standards. That can be done
with both financial incentives and technology transfers. What finally
brought the Chinese on board with Kyoto and previous international
environmental agreements was the attraction of getting paid to do the
right thing. If the United States joins the fight against climate
change–and if the price is right–there is every reason to believe
that China can commit to doing the right thing again.