Latest Articles Beyond Copenhagen

A disappointing business

Jie Feng — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 14:53:00 +0000

China's greenest entrepreneurs went to Copenhagen amid great fanfare but many were left asking what they actually achieved. Feng Jie reports.

On returning from the climate conference at Copenhagen, the Vanke Group chairman, Wang Shi, posted a picture of himself pushing an old bike through the streets of the city on his blog. On December 7, the head of the largest property company in China – who climbs an 8,000-metre high mountain every year – had joined a group of Chinese businessmen on a week-long cycling tour around the city, after which he announced the saving of 115 kilograms of carbon.

The trip was quickly branded a mere stunt. But Wang did not seem to mind, saying that, unlike actors, the businessmen were playing themselves and that he hoped to see more, and better, such events in the future. Afterwards, he and his companions made numerous appearances in the Chinese media, talking about Copenhagen and advocating low-carbon ideas.

On December 5, Wang and Feng Lun, chairman of Beijing Vantone Real Estate, were chosen to board the “Climate Express”, a special train from Brussels to Copenhagen organised by the United Nations Environment Program, the International Union of Railways and the World Wildlife Fund. Another group of “green entrepreneurs”, including Marjorie Yang, chairwoman of textile manufacturer Esquel Group; Zhang Yue, chairman of Broad Air-conditioning; Zhang Zaidong, chairman of Beijing Fengshang Real Estate; Song Jun, president of hotel and travel investment firm Beijing Jiuhan Tiancheng and Huang Ming, chairman of Himin Solar Energy Group travelled north from Germany with Lu Zhi, Peking University professor and head of the Shanshui Conservation Centre. They met with Deutsche Bank’s climate finance team in Frankfurt, visited Europe’s solar-power “capital”, Freiburg, and then joined the property group in Copenhagen.

This was the first time Chinese entrepreneurs had attended a UN climate-change conference as observers and a rare high-profile appearance at an international climate-change event. Hopes were high for these enlightened businessmen, both in China and overseas. So what did they actually do?

At a small ceremony to mark the start of the trip held at Beijing’s exclusive Chang’an Club, they said they wanted to put forward the Chinese business world’s stance on climate change, and learn about the business risks and opportunities it will bring. On December 8, they set out this stance at their first appearance in Copenhagen. This took place away from the Bella Center, the main conference facility, at the five-star Radisson hotel, where Chinese premier Wen Jiabao would later stay. Unfortunately very few foreign reporters were present and almost all the attendees were Chinese. So why, those present wondered, couldn’t they just have held the press conference in China?

On December 11, these business leaders were not present at the Business Day event, hosted by the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBSCD) and the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC).

The WBCSD has 200 members, including Shell, Duke Energy, E.ON, BP and Rio Tinto. At Copenhagen the WBCSD advocated a global carbon market and a voluntary industrial code, covering industry, agricultural oil use, nuclear power and carbon capture and storage. The ICC, a similar organisation whose members include several major polluters such as Areva, Exxon Mobil and Vattenfall, continued to tell political leaders that business is part of the solution and that economic growth and free trade should be given priority.

The reason the Chinese group was absent was simpler than many thought. The head of the delegation, Wang Shi, had already left Copenhagen due to a prior engagement and the other members, for the most part having poor English and little experience of international events, were not too keen to attend – and so they didn’t.

As head of one of the world’s largest property firms, Wang Shi was undoubtedly the most prominent member of the delegation. In 2007, Vanke started to use reusable steel frames in buildings, rather than the traditional wood. Over the past three years, this method has been applied to 600,000 square metres of building space and, after Copenhagen, Wang set a new target of two million square metres. His ambitions do not stop there, however. Wang wants to lead China’s property sector in making a contribution of more than 10% to China’s 2020 emissions target.

Wang told all of this to the Wall Street Journal and Daily Telegraph newspapers while he was on the Climate Express, to widespread acclaim. And so his early departure, to a certain extent, reduced the voice of Chinese business at Copenhagen. More disappointing was the fact that, although the Business Day was on the agenda provided at the pre-departure press conference and was widely reported in both Chinese and western media, not a single Chinese businessperson was seen at the actual event.

However, the Business Day, which brought together chief executives of giant multinationals, was also lacking attendees from South Africa, Brazil and India. Moreover, those who did attend did not gain much. As Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change told them, the negotiations going on at the Bella Center were inter-governmental and the participants temporarily had to put business to one side.

The delegation was more influenced by events not on the agenda; namely, the civil society activities they attended as private individuals, such as marches organised by non-governmental organisations (NGOs). Song Jun of the Jiuhan Tiancheng, commented that the range of protests by NGO members gave him more to think about than the disorganised negotiations and dull reports and made him more determined than ever to keep his business on a green path. This entrepeneur, often criticised for being too idealistic, has always tried to persuade more people to accept traditional Chinese ideas of conservation, calling for a limit on human demands rather than technical solutions to environmental and climate issues.

In 2002, Song started investing in the Moonlight Lake eco-tourism project in the deserts of Inner Mongolia, in northern China. But it is hard to stick to environmental ideals in today’s China and he has suffered a number of financial setbacks, only making a profit after five or six years. Next he plans to implement his new grasslands conservation plan in Xilin Gol, which aims to bring back herders forced to leave by environmental problems. The plan won support from Wang Shi and Zhang Zaidong at Copenhagen – perhaps the most concrete result Song got from the summit.

Regardless, many people were left disappointed by the performance of these entrepreneurs at Copenhagen. Like the Chinese government, the Chinese business world has, over the last few years, been striving to improve communications and keep up with the global response to climate change and environmental protection. But getting that message across fully and accurately still needs work.

However, some are doing better than others. The story of how Zhang Yue of Broad Air-conditioning gave up his private jet is well known. And Broad's non-electric air-conditioners were the focus of the only corporate case study in a report presented to G8 leaders by former UK prime minister Tony Blair in 2008. Zhang came and went at Copenhagen, clutching his own document, Measures to Reduce CO2 Emissions. He believes that there is huge potential for emissions reductions to be made by the Chinese public, though nobody knows how he has worked this out.

Many are also familiar with the story of Huang Ming’s solar empire and he was one of the delegation’s most active speakers. He also organised a football match to urge countries not to pass the buck on climate change and, on returning to China, called for COP18, the UN-sponsored climate summit scheduled for 2012, to be held in China. Shi Zhengrong of solar firm Suntech Power is even better known internationally. In May 2009, he was the only Chinese entrepreneur from the private sector to appear at the World Business Summit on Climate Change in Copenhagen. Unfortunately he was not able to be present at COP15.

But, for these business personalities, whether they come across well or badly is not the important thing. Wang Shi, Zhang Yue and Song Jun are more concerned about the weak message sent out by Copenhagen. Without a clear, strong and long signal, it is hard for businesses to make investment decisions – even for these pioneers who have not hestitated in going with the green flow.

Feng Jie is a journalist at Southern Weekend and was formerly a reporter at the China Economic Herald.

Homepage image from hudong.com shows (left to right) Song Jun, Feng Lun, Wang Shi, Zhang Yue and Zhang Zaidong.

Strength in numbers

Tan Copsey — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 14:45:00 +0000

Faith in international cooperation was severely dented at Copenhagen – but it is still our best bet for tackling global warming, argues Tan Copsey.

The January 31 deadline set in Copenhagen for nations to submit national plans to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions to the United Nations under the newly formed Copenhagen Accord has been and gone. By February 1, 55 countries had made pledges to either cut or limit their emissions. Despite this positive news, it is unclear where international negotiations go from here.

The voluntary pledges submitted to the United Nations in association with the accord vary noticeably in form and substance, with a range of baseline years and commitment levels. Norway, for instance, is committed to reducing its emissions by at least 30% on 1990 levels by 2020, while the United States will probably seek to cut its emissions by 17% on 2005 levels – although, as made clear in their very brief submission, US action is dependent on securing domestic legislation, the prospects of which have dimmed significantly in the last month since the Democrat party lost the Massachusetts by-election, bringing an end to the party’s senate supermajority. China and other members of the newly formed BASIC block of countries – Brazil, India and South Africa – have re-affirmed their pre-conference pledges to limit the rise of their emissions.

No one is yet sure how the accord fits in with the existing framework of global climate governance and negotiation. Yvo De Boer, who coordinates the United Nations negotiating process, hailed the submissions as “an important invigoration of the UN climate-change talks”. China’s prime minister, Wen Jiabao, meanwhile, is one of many who have expressed hope that the accord will set the stage for the agreement of a binding global climate deal at negotiations in Mexico this year that expands on the institutions and mechanisms of the Kyoto Protocol, with binding targets for industrialised nations.

But economists Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger of the Breakthrough Institute, a California-based think tank, recently argued that “the entire Kyoto framework for reducing carbon emissions died with the UN climate negotiations at Copenhagen.” In its place, they suggest the Copenhagen Accord may be a step towards a more fractured series of national- and regional- policy measures and a non-binding, bottom-up international system. “The real international action will involve bilateral and multilateral negotiations to develop and deploy clean-energy technologies,” they say.

Such an approach presents new dangers and may be insufficient to meet the specifically global challenges presented by climate change. Put simply, a more voluntary approach may be less successful in reducing emissions. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has recommended that developed-country emissions drop by 25% to 40% on 1990 levels by 2020. According to the World Resources Institute, the voluntary targets pledged in association with the accord are likely to result in developed-country emissions decreasing by between 12% to 19% on 1990 levels by 2020.

Recent reports from the UN Environment Programme, Project Catalyst and Ecofys have suggested that current pledges are not sufficient to prevent a rise of two degrees Celsius or more. Janos Pasztor, a climate advisor to UN secretary-general, Ban Ki-moon, reaffirmed this after reviewing pledges made in association with the accord. An analysis by Climate Interactive goes a step further, suggesting that “if current proposals were fully implemented, average global temperature would overshoot the two degrees goal and would in fact increase by approximately 3.9 degrees Celsius by 2100.”

In the past, international negotiations have acted as a catalyst for ambitious national commitments that push countries beyond domestic constraints. A voluntary, non-binding system may instead promote an unfortunate race-to-the-bottom scenario, where nations renege on the voluntary commitments they make. We are already seeing examples of this: Canada submitted a weaker target to the United Nations on January 31 than it was committed to at the start of Copenhagen. Feeble targets, coupled with an absence of measures to enforce compliance, will most likely result in a larger rise in temperatures.

Progress on securing finance was one of the few areas where the Copenhagen summit may be judged a success. Developed countries pledged US$30 billion (205 billion yuan) over the three years from 2010 to 2013 and US$100 billion (683 billion yuan) a year from 2020 for developing countries to mitigate and adapt to climate change. But as a recent report from the International Institute for Environment and Development highlights, crucial questions remain about where this funding will come from and how it will be distributed. Billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates also recently expressed concern that climate-change finance would not be additional and may eat into existing aid budgets. These concerns seem justified – the Guardian newspaper reported that some of the United Kingdom’s initial commitment would be recycled from existing government-aid budgets.

The accord also lacks supporting legal architecture and institutions to facilitate international finance for low-carbon development. In the short term, countries like Brazil, which is reliant on international finance to support efforts to reduce deforestation, are likely to face difficulties in implementing national climate-change policies.

Without binding commitments and strong institutions, a new regime would rely more heavily on trust between nations. At some point, it is likely that this trust would break down, triggering new threats to trade and financial flows between nations. The United States and France have already openly discussed the possibility of placing tariffs on carbon-intensive imports from countries seen to be failing to do their share. Such tariffs would likely be implemented unevenly, creating further international friction and possible retaliation.

Faced with these serious challenges it might seem logical for countries to renew attempts to secure a deal in Mexico that builds on the Kyoto Protocol and the twin-track negotiating process begun in Bali in 2007. But the problems with these institutions create political impediments to a deal that are not likely simply to disappear.

A degree of pragmatism is therefore required when assessing the Copenhagen Accord. It is still possible that the agreement, combined with more progress on key issues mentioned briefly in its text – avoiding deforestation, providing finance for low-carbon development and adaptation in the developing world and monitoring efforts to reduce emissions – can form the basis of a new international architecture for dealing with climate change.

On the evidence of the past month, this architecture may well be messy, incomplete and inefficient. But it is still preferable to international anarchy. Climate change is a global challenge that cannot be dealt with by nations acting in isolation. At this particularly difficult moment, we should welcome any moves towards international cooperation and recognition of interdependence.

Tan Copsey is development manager at chinadialogue.

Homepage image by Tattooed JJ

Copenhagen discord

AnnaDa Costa — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 11:46:00 +0000

Eight weeks on from the climate summit, the agreement it produced – and the United Nations process itself – are under fire. Anna da Costa reports.

A key deadline for countries to submit emission-reduction goals to the United Nations as part of the recently negotiated Copenhagen Accord passed on Sunday, January 31. The United Nations received commitments from 55 nations, but 139 countries remain unsupportive of the political statement, leading the international body to push back the commitment deadline indefinitely.

Since the high level climate-change summit in Copenhagen concluded in December, global climate talks have been in a state of confusion. Two parallel tracks are already under way – one that includes the United States and one that omits this significant world emitter. The Copenhagen Accord, some say, threatens to introduce a third procedural track, complicating the already tense deliberations.

The accord, a non-binding political statement introduced in the 11th hour of the Copenhagen summit, has been praised by some for garnering stronger commitments from major developing nations, which could in turn deliver a binding global climate treaty. Yet its formulation has also threatened to destabilise the nearly 20-year-old process developed under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the leading international body for climate-change negotiations.

The United States, Brazil, South Africa, India and China formulated the accord with the understanding that the text would later be adopted by all 194 nations. But many participants considered this outcome to be undemocratic and a departure from a UN process meant to offer equal voice to every nation. Many had hoped that the Copenhagen conference would deliver a legally binding international treaty on climate change or at least provide direction on many of the core components under negotiation. But the accord itself contains little such detail and provides instead for countries to set their own emission-reduction targets unilaterally.

Among other elements, it states that two degrees Celsius is the target above which global temperatures must not rise; it proposes the mobilisation of US$30 billion (205 billion yuan) by 2012 and US$100 billion (683 billion yuan) by 2020 for developing countries to address climate change; and it calls on developed and developing countries to submit their national actions on climate change to the United Nations by January 31, a deadline that has now been postponed “indefinitely”.

According to Sanjay Vashist, director of Climate Action Network South Asia, without larger consensus the accord reflects “an outcome of a flawed negotiating process...negotiated by a small group of countries” rather than the 194-nation body. There are further reservations about the accord’s content itself. While the text addresses several key negotiation issues, many crucial details remain undetermined. “It is far from clear where the funding [for climate change mitigation and adaptation] will come from, if it is genuinely new and additional and how it will be allocated and channelled,” says Saleemul Huq, a senior fellow with the International Institute for Environment and Development’s climate-change group, who co-authored a recent report on climate finance.

Some observers say the accord does not contain the level of ambition with respect to temperature rise that is needed to protect the rights to survival or livelihood of many nations and people. According to recent analysis from sustainable energy consultant Ecofys, the emission-reduction targets agreed so far will commit the world to a 3.5-degree Celsius rise in global temperature, not the agreed two degrees.

Other advocacy groups have taken a different perspective, highlighting the accord's value in establishing an important basis for a shift in US domestic politics. Firmer commitments from large emerging economies such as China and India may facilitate domestic climate-change legislation in the US Senate – an action seen as crucial to obtaining strong commitments from Australia, Canada, and Japan, they say.

“It’s a powerful signal to see president Obama, premier Wen, prime minister Singh, and president Zuma agree on a meeting of the minds,” said senator John Kerry, chair of the US Senate’s foreign relations committee, in a prepared statement. “These are the four horsemen of a climate-change solution. With this in hand, we can work to pass domestic legislation early next year to bring us across the finish line.”

The United States has submitted a pledge to reduce national emissions by 17% below 2005 levels by 2020, and 54 other nations, including Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, India and South Africa, have also provided commitments to the United Nations.

What next? In the wake of contention over the accord, major developing countries have restated their commitment to concluding a successful global treaty at meetings to be held in Mexico in December 2010. In a joint statement in Delhi, India, in late January, environment ministers from the so-called BASIC countries – Brazil, South Africa, India, and China – reiterated their support for the Copenhagen Accord and their “commitment to working together with all other countries to ensure an agreed outcome...later this year”. The ministers called on Danish prime minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen, who hosted the Copenhagen summit, to convene meetings of the two negotiating groups by March 2010 and ensure that they meet “at least five times” prior to the Mexico gathering, the 16th Conference of the Parties (COP-16) under the UNFCCC.

Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, remains optimistic that nations will announce deeper commitments in the months ahead. “I think [the accord’s] adequacy...will depend greatly on what actions the world is willing to take now, and I hope they will take urgent and adequate action in the future,” he said last month in an interview with Science magazine.

The four BASIC countries coordinated their positions closely in Copenhagen, exerting pressure on industrialised nations to commit to ambitious goals for emission reductions as well as to provide technical and financial support to developing nations. But some observers argue that these large developing countries betrayed the interests of their smaller allies in the Group of 77 (G77), a broader grouping of developing nations. There was concern that, by breaking off into a separate bloc, the BASIC nations put at risk many of the fundamental negotiating tenets that the G77 had embraced.

Jairam Ramesh, India’s minister for environment and forests, sought to address this concern at a press conference following a meeting of BASIC leaders on January 24 in New Delhi. “BASIC is embedded in the G77, so there is no fissure,” he said. “Since these four are the big countries, they need to have some coordinated actions towards helping the poor and vulnerable countries within the G77, as well as taking [their] own actions.” Ramesh further emphasised that after each BASIC meeting – gatherings that are now scheduled to take place quarterly – the group’s decisions will be communicated to the G77 for consideration prior to any wider UN meetings.

Some critics have raised questions about the ability of the United Nations to manage the global negotiations fairly and effectively. “This is a declaration that small and poor countries don’t matter, that international civil society doesn’t matter and that serious limits on carbon don’t matter,” Bill McKibben, a US environmentalist and founder of the climate action group 350.org, said in December. “The president has wrecked the United Nations and he’s wrecked the possibility of a tough plan to control global warming.”

Others suggest that the UN-sponsored climate talks have become unwieldy and should be addressed within a smaller forum of the major emitters, such as the G8+5 – a group including the G8 nations plus the BASIC countries and Mexico – or the G20. Notably, the 55 nations that are reported to have submitted targets or actions under the accord to date represent 78% of global greenhouse-gas emissions. “We...need to have major reform of the UN body overseeing the negotiations and of the way the negotiations are conducted,” wrote UK climate secretary Ed Miliband in a late-December commentary in UK newspaper, the Guardian. In a more recent interview in the same publication, US climate negotiator Jonathan Pershing observed, “It is...impossible to imagine a negotiation of enormous complexity where you have a table of 192 countries involved in all the detail.”

In their joint declaration, the BASIC environment ministers were quick to stress their wish for the accord’s content to feed into the current framework of climate negotiations and not to adopt a new framework based on the agreement. India’s Ramesh said: “All of us are unanimously of the view that the value of the accord lies not as a stand-alone document but as part of the two-track negotiating process.”

Anna da Costa is a Worldwatch Institute fellow based in New Delhi.

An earlier version of this article was published by the Worldwatch Institute as “As Climate Talks Stumble, UN Process in Question”.

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Time for a plan

Xuan Qin — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 15:56:00 +0000

Months of friendly discussion between China and the west went up in smoke at Copenhagen. Qin Xuan argues that a new diplomacy is needed to avoid a repeat performance.

The most valuable lesson to be learned from the climate change conference in Copenhagen is this: the aims of global governance are unlikely to be met while the diplomatic strategies of China and emerging economies remain unsettled.

Unlike World Trade Organisation talks, the aim of climate negotiations is not only bilateral or multilateral deals between individual governments, but also direct participation in global action. The outcome of the meeting is a marker of the United Nations' ability to handle global climate governance. But the Copenhagen talks failed to reach consensus, even on matters of principle. Some of the nations involved in the process have decisive influence, but are not yet clear on what their own targets and role in international affairs actually are.

After Copenhagen, opinion in the European Union and United States quickly turned against China. A report by British journalist Mark Lynas in the Guardian newspaper claiming China had wrecked the conference and a similar article by UK climate change secretary Ed Miliband caused an outcry in China. In response to these international misgivings, the country’s official news agency Xinhua published the inside story of premier Wen Jiabao’s experiences during his 60 hours at the conference.

To understand the fierce response from China, we need to look back at the diplomatic programme the country engaged in with both the United States and European Union in the year-long run-up to Copenhagen. A strong basis of trust appeared to have been built up with both America and Europe through diplomatic activity under the auspices of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Chinese People’s Institute of Foreign Affairs (CPIFA) and the National People’s Congress. This makes the problems at Copenhagen all the more surprising.

At the start of 2009, during the early days of president Barack Obama’s administration, US think-tanks the Brookings Institution and the Asia Society proposed a “Group of Two” (G2) relationship between China and the United States. The G2 framework would operate outside of the United Nations; the two countries would establish standards, which would subsequently be widened to the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), then the European Union and, finally, other developing nations.

Hillary Clinton visited China to lobby for closer cooperation between the two countries, and the State Council became the channel for establishing a new relationship between the White House and China. The G2 idea was not embraced but China and the United States did engage in cooperative discussion on energy and the environment. Some academics privately say they believe China hopes to use such partnerships with the United States to win support for adjustments to China’s economic and energy structure.

US climate change envoy Todd Stern paid a number of visits to China in 2009. In May, speaker of the US House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi also paid a rare visit to China, and several months later Wu Bangguo, head of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress, visited the United States and met with representatives of the Senate energy panel.

While China was talking to the United States, it was also engaging in brisk diplomacy with the United Kingdom and European Union. Former British prime minister Tony Blair paid a number of visits to China at the invitation of the CPIFA, witnessing the efforts being made to reduce emissions in undeveloped regions such as Guizhou in the south-west and Ningxia in the north. Blair’s comments on his return, combined with Ed Miliband’s optimistic predictions on China’s stance in the run-up to Copenhagen, give us reason to believe that the European Union was, at least prior to the release of emissions targets, supportive of China’s efforts.

China’s diplomacy with the other countries in the “BASIC” group – Brazil, South Africa, India and China – is also worthy of note. Over the space of more than a year, these four nations have met after every set of climate change negotiations in a bid to maintain a consensus.

So what happened at Copenhagen? A Xinhua article published on December 25th asserts that Wen was excluded from various “clandestine negotiations”, including a meeting of several countries’ leaders held by the United States after dinner on the 17th, which “triggered strong discontent”.

Wen did not attend the meetings of national leaders on the morning or afternoon of December 18. In the morning, vice minister of foreign affairs, He Yafei, attended in his place. And, after a meeting with US president Obama at noon, Yu Qingtai – deputy head of the delegation and a lower level official – took part in the discussions. This provoked speculation and debate and the content of the Xinhua article explains why China was unhappy with closed-door meetings. But, if the article is accurate, it may be worth asking why trust between China and the United States and European Union was so weak that they were unable to work together after a full year of discussion.

During the first week of the conference, the Group of 77 (G77), a loose coalition of 130 developing countries, including China, reached a consensus over three evenings of talks – something rarely seen in recent years. The value of maintaining that consensus lay in upholding the principle of a two-track negotiation system, stressing the classification of nations as developing or developed and finding a new agreement based on “common but differentiated responsibilities”. If lines had instead been drawn between major economic groups and poor nations, the game would have become one played between the Group of 20 (G20) major economies and certain developing nations – and the logical result of that would have been, at the very least, some changes to the two-track system.

But, at the end of the conference, a split appeared between the least developed nations and the major developing economies of the G77 – to an extent this was inevitable given the shifting global order. This change in alignments most affects the BASIC nations, because they are both members of the G20 and developing nations. If the principle is accepted that major economies should take on bigger duties in regard to cutting carbon emissions, there will then be no difference between the BASIC group and developed countries.

I returned from Copenhagen on the same flight as the Chinese delegation. Having spoken to its members, I believe the next UN climate change meeting in Mexico may help to strengthen relations between the BASIC nations, the G77 and China. But the crucial factor in this is whether or not the promised EU and US aid appears.

Zhang Haibin, a specialist in environmental diplomacy at Peking University, believes China faces a number of difficult issues in the wake of Copenhagen. First, he says, the international pressure on China is continuing to grow, and its status as a developing nation becoming less clear. China believes its emissions targets are very ambitious, but the international response to these has not been what it hoped for. China is a major emitter and an economic power; the world’s expectations are increasing, as are China’s responsibilities.

Second, developed nations are becoming more closely aligned, while developing nations are diverging. Maintaining unity within the developing world is an increasingly difficult task. Third, China finds itself at the centre stage of the international community and at the heart of the conflict. Its room for manoeuvre is shrinking and its diplomatic policies and strategies facing ever greater challenges.

Fourth, doubts have been raised over the United Nations’ role in nuclear non-proliferation, global finance and climate change – a major challenge to China’s multilateral diplomacy.

Solving these issues will mean changes to China’s diplomatic strategy. These changes will be determined by two factors. At the international level, China needs to adjust its stance in step with other interest groups – and Copenhagen may promote this. Domestically, China’s leaders need to analyse and coordinate different interests in order to further stabilise domestic policy.

Ultimately, I believe that China should form a twenty-first-century diplomatic strategy to deal with climate change. At the core of this strategy will be this question: what costs is China willing to bear to meet regional and global diplomatic responsibilities?

Until those strategic changes have been made, it is hard to imagine there will be any progress in climate-change negotiations.

Qin Xuan is a reporter at Southern Metropolis Daily.

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What to watch for in Washington

Suzanne Goldenberg — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 14:34:00 +0000

The global recession, US mid-term elections and a weak Copenhagen deal all play a part in the future of cap-and-trade legislation. Suzanne Goldenberg explains what lies ahead in 2010.

What is the state of play for climate-change legislation in America?

Barack Obama put his reputation on the line at Copenhagen by saying America would act on climate change. Now it’s up to Congress. The House of Representatives passed the Waxman-Markey bill last June, which would set a price on carbon and would put progressively tighter limits on greenhouse-gas emissions, with a 17% cut from 2005 levels by 2020, and 80% by 2050.

Barbara Boxer, a California Democrat, passed a nearly identical version of the bill out of the Senate environment committee last November. But action in the Senate has stalled. Boxer stared down a Republican boycott to get a bill through her committee. But Democrats are deeply reluctant to throw themselves into another full-on confrontation with Republicans so soon after the bruising battle over health-care reform.

What happens next?

US environmental organisations say there is still a good chance the Senate will move ahead on a climate-change bill this year. A triumvirate of senators -- Democrat John Kerry, Republican Lindsey Graham and independent Joe Lieberman -- are working to craft a climate-change bill they think would have a good chance of getting support from Republican as well as Democratic senators. Kerry had earlier promised a blueprint late last year. The newest deadline is at the end of January. The Senate is then expected to begin its push in the spring.

Did the Copenhagen climate summit hurt or help prospects for the bill?

Obama’s 13-hours-on-the-ground diplomacy at Copenhagen was seen as evidence of his commitment to action -- which should help give momentum to the bill. The deal reached at Copenhagen by the largest emitters -- though it fell far short of hopes for the summit -- also includes important concessions from China to begin curbing its rate of emissions and to open its books on how it cuts emissions. That will help neutralise the argument that China is not doing its bit, and that the United States would give up competitive advantage if it took on energy reform.

Will the Senate bill look just like Waxman-Markey?

Not entirely. Kerry and Graham are determined to get Republican support, which could mean a number of hard compromises for environmentalists. One is an expansion of nuclear power, with Republicans pushing hard for more cheap government loans for new plants, plus streamlined regulations. There is also a push for offshore oil-drilling. Other ideas include limiting the kinds of industries that would be compelled to begin reducing their emissions. One proposal under discussion would only put an emissions cap on power plants.

What about the US midterm elections?

The Democrats – Obama’s party -- anticipate losses in both the House of Representatives and the Senate in the 2010 elections, which will further impair the prospects of getting climate-change law. But even the approach of the 2010 elections is making an impact.

Democratic leaders say the Senate must pass a climate-change bill by spring 2010, if there is to be any US legislation at all. Democrats from coal and old-industry states will be cautious about signing up to sweeping energy and climate laws in the run-up to the midterm elections in November. The oil, coal and manufacturing lobbies have been spending millions of dollars to frame the proposed laws as measures that will fuel unemployment and increase home-heating bills.

What if the Senate fails to act?

Climate-change legislation may stall in the Senate, but the federal government -- and several states and cities -- are moving ahead. The business world is also coming on side. The Obama administration has raised fuel efficiency standards for cars. California, the most-populous state, has ordered power companies to provide one-third of its electricity from clean and renewable energy by 2020. Perhaps most importantly, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) said last month that it would begin regulating greenhouse-gas emissions. However, some Republicans want to keep the EPA out of that role. The Senate is due to vote on January 20 on whether to delay EPA regulatory action.

How does this affect a global deal to curb carbon emissions?

One of the key outcomes from Copenhagen is a commitment from industrialised countries to raise $100 billion a year from 2020 to help the most vulnerable countries adapt to climate change. But America’s promise to mobilise its share of the $100 billion depends on the establishment of a carbon market -- which will be created through climate-change legislation. Obama administration officials have said the country will raise its share from a variety of sources -- not just government funds. No climate-change law means no US carbon market and sharply reduced funds for poor countries.

www.guardian.co.uk/

Copyright Guardian News and Media Limited 2010

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When China said “no”

Haili Cao — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 13:33:00 +0000

Some observers say that China wrecked the climate negotiations at Copenhagen. But the reality is more complex, argues Cao Haili.

If climate change were only an environmental issue, there would be a far easier solution. However, the interplay of national interests that are involved – involving politics, economics and development – places multiple strains on the prospects of an international agreement.

Many observers feel that the two-week climate-change conference in Copenhagen was a disastrous failure. The Copenhagen Accord, produced in closed talks by a small number of key nations, could not have been less substantive; it fell far short of most predicted goals and lacked any legal force. At least five nations tangled over issues of transparency and legitimacy. The angry language used by their representatives on the final evening provided a farcical finale for the conference’s global audience.

There is still disagreement over what really happened in those final 48 hours. Xinhua, China’s official news agency, reported that Chinese premier Wen Jiabao was not invited to secret US-initiated talks on the evening of December 17 and early the next morning, to China’s great displeasure. India’s climate envoy Shyam Saran also raised this matter in a press conference on the afternoon of December 18.

Mark Lynas, a British journalist and member of the Maldives delegation, wrote in the Guardian that he saw at first hand how China “wrecked” closed-door talks between the leaders of 20 nations. Wen Jiabao did not attend, dispatching instead a vice-minister from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Western media reports said that Wen Jiabao, unhappy with US insistence on international verification of China’s emission reductions, refused to join president Barack Obama at the meeting, blocking the negotiations.

Ed Miliband, the British secretary of state for energy and climate, told The Guardian that China had tried to “hijack” the Copenhagen Accord. UK prime minister Gordon Brown expressed a hope that China and the United States would show “they were doing more”.

Besides the rift between China and the United States over measuring, reporting and verification (MRV), the cited evidence of China’s “wrecking” behaviour was its firm opposition to inclusion of the target of global emissions reduction of 50% on 1990 levels by 2050, with developed nations making cuts of 80%.

The reason for China’s opposition was simple: it would restrict China’s development. Given the country’s rate of development and its economic and energy structure, the target would be a tough one for it to reach. Lü Xuedu, a Chinese delegate and deputy director of the National Climate Center, pointed out that global carbon emissions in 1990 were 21 billion tonnes, so a 50% cut by 2050 would mean emissions of 10.5 billion tonnes. In 2005, China emitted 6 billion tonnes of carbon. If the current rate of development continues, those 10.5 billion tonnes might not be enough for China alone, let alone the rest of the world.

China is concerned about domestic political and economic stability. It does not want international legislation restricting its development and is unwilling to see any language that may lead to caps on its emissions.

China did not suddenly arrive at this stance. It has held to this line consistently, particularly after the Bangkok climate talks in October. At that point the European Union’s position changed, and the crux of negotiations became whether or not to stick to the twin-track system of the Bali Roadmap, or merge the two tracks. Under a twin-track arrangement, China and other developing nations are not required to commit to compulsory reductions. But if the two tracks merged, China could face much more stringent restrictions. A worsening conflict between China and the major developed nations became a new piece in the climate-change puzzle.

However, it is unrealistic to believe that without China’s opposition a binding agreement would have been reached. Take the example of the Doha Development Round of WTO negotiations, which were initiated in 2001 but are currently stalled, in which China is not one of the major players. Prior to Doha, the US and EU could remain in control. But now that era has passed: developing nations have a larger say in world affairs. Multilateral negotiations can no longer be dominated by a single nation, or even a single group of nations. This is true for trade talks, and even more so for the more complex interests involved in climate negotiations.

Even if China had not said “no”, the reduction targets that the United States – the other decisive force in climate negotiations – were able to commit to would still make an agreement hard to reach.

The climate bill passed by the House of Representatives proposes that the United States make cuts of 17% on 2005 emission levels by 2020. Against a 1990 baseline, this is around 4%. This is nowhere near the 40% cuts proposed by developing nations, and far short even of the 20% to 30% goal proposed by the EU. But the United States continues to argue that its efforts are sufficient.

The US political system does not give the president absolute decision-making power. The last two decades has seen Congress become ever more partisan and any proposed bill will face strong opposition. Currently, the US climate bill is under discussion in the senate. Senator John Kerry is an active supporter of a climate deal and made a trip to Copenhagen to campaign for one. But it will not be easy for a bitterly divided senate to pass his proposal without significant changes. Therefore, the United States was unable to put forward stronger targets at Copenhagen.

In fact, the United States was happy to see a weak accord emerge from Copenhagen. Congress is not yet ready to accept any international binding agreement. The Obama administration needs to use greater wisdom and better tactics to ensure the climate bill passes the senate in the spring. Otherwise, any commitments the US makes at negotiations are simply bad cheques.

Other richer developing nations, such as India, are also unwilling to accept caps from the developing world. The Indian environment minister Jairam Ramesh visited Beijing in August to discuss an alliance against western pressure. India’s emissions – both in total volume and per capita – are far lower than China’s, but it still has major problems in balancing development and the environment. China is not alone in opposing curbs on overall emissions.

Since Copenhagen produced a weak and non-binding political document, China bought more time for its development. But it is hard to say how long this expediency can last. International pressure on China is already building, and not just from the developed world – it also comes also from the developing nations most at risk from climate change. China’s 30-year economic miracle has come at the cost of a rapidly deteriorating environment; this has not been sustainable development. China has no cause to avoid its responsibilities, either internationally or domestically.

The negotiations, I believe, will eventually have to move towards a single track. Any agreement which does not include China and the United States – the world’s two largest emitters by volume – will not achieve any meaningful result. In one sense then, the Copenhagen Accord at least has achieved something by putting China and the US in the same boat.

Cao Haili, formerly senior reporter at Caijing magazine, is a reporter for chinadialogue.

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The end of idealism

Wei Tang — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 12:31:00 +0000

The failure of climate talks in Copenhagen exposed some uncomfortable truths about the current global order, argues Tang Wei.

UN-led climate talks drew to a close in Copenhagen on December 19. Although a weak outcome had been widely predicted, many were still shocked by just how little the conference managed to achieve.

The World Resources Institute had listed five indicators for success at Copenhagen: targets, timetables and actions for cutting emissions; funding for global climate action; common standards for tracking emissions reductions; a peer review mechanism for measurement, reporting and verification of cuts; and a legally-binding climate agreement. The conference failed on virtually all counts.

Al Gore may believe a carbon pricing mechanism can create a link between emissions reductions and incentives in daily life, but the negotiations achieved almost nothing in this regard. The only concrete achievements were the statement of intent on the need for urgent global action on climate change, and the US$100 billion (683 billion yuan) in aid from developed nations to the developing world and island nations to be disbursed from 2020.

The endless stream of proposals put forward at the negotiations – and accompanying diplomatic onslaughts – highlighted how much disagreement still surrounds four basic issues; namely, emissions cuts by developed nations; emissions caps for developing nations; assistance to poor nations; and a future emissions reduction deal. Clearly, there are still barriers to joint action on climate change.

There is a limit to the world’s capacity for greenhouse gases and the international community must curb the emissions of individual nations. But they must do so while taking into account economic growth, inter-generational equality and human survival. The result is tension between environmental capacity and development needs.

At the same time, if we are to slow down climate change, we need innovation in new energy sources and a technological revolution. These areas will affect any nation’s basic ability to compete and influence changes in the international system.

Climate change has gradually morphed from a matter of science and environmental diplomacy into one of economics and geopolitics. Developed and developing world camps have split into three groups: the European Union, the US-led Umbrella Group, and the Group of 77, a loose coalition of 130 developing countries, including China. Within these, there are further divisions – eastern and western Europe; the United States, Japan and Australia; the African Union; island nations; and the BASIC (Brazil, South Africa, India, China) group. The multiple dealings and checks and balances created by this system make for exceptionally complex negotiations.

In the past, the most prominent characteristic of climate talks has been to pre-empt the other side and make concessions, or to propose environmental protection measures – with conditions attached. But all the signs at Copenhagen suggest the differing interests of small island nations and superpowers cannot always be settled by negotiations and discussion.

The Copenhagen talks have overturned some accepted beliefs; for example, that climate change is a classic, non-traditional security issue that can only be solved by global cooperation, and that doing so will create new areas of growth for all nations.

This idealistic thinking ignores the fact that action by sovereign nations is invariably driven by their own ecological vulnerability, the costs of emissions cuts and special interests. No nation will sacrifice its own welfare for the sake of the world’s – even if it means disaster for others.

Realism may be cruel, but it makes clear that the existing system of international governance is powerless in the face of irresponsible superpowers; and that the current arrangements, above all, serve the interests of northern nations. People once believed that the election of president Barack Obama would lead to fundamental change in US climate change policy – that the United States would start to consider its image as an international leader and the competitiveness of its green industries and thus commit to mandatory emission reductions and a return to multilateralism.

But during the negotiations, Obama and US climate representative Todd Stern showed that, while the US stance may have softened somewhat in line with international trends, the new administration has done little to set itself apart from George W Bush on the substantive matters of mandatory emissions reductions, necessary cuts from emerging economies, financial and technical support and the principle of “common but differentiated responsibilities”. Changes in US climate-change policy are therefore limited and, at most, merely alterations in attitude, intention and ideals.

From start to finish, US climate-change policy has prioritised its own national interests; it is designed to fight for the lifestyle of its citizens and national supremacy, even in the context of this global issue. The principle of sovereignty above all else still survives, even in the postmodern era.

Thanks to determined campaigning from developing nations, the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities, the Bali roadmap and the two-track negotiation mechanism were all upheld at Copenhagen. But the future direction of development trends also began to emerge – developing nations will also gradually commit to emissions targets, and emerging economies such as China, India and Brazil should sign up to mandatory measurable targets and submit to international verification.

In the run-up to Copenhagen, China and many other emerging nations announced carbon reduction targets and used a meeting of BASIC nations to express support for the Copenhagen negotiations and their unshakeable diplomatic “red lines”. A string of incidents during the negotiation process showed that developed nations, on the other hand, were not prepared to accept and respect the interests and hopes of the developing world.

It is clear from these events that, in international climate diplomacy, the right to speak has to be fought for and this is how climate-change mechanisms are formed. We should not think that developed nations will surrender their own interests and provide finance and technology of their own accord, nor should we expect continued unity among developing nations when interests among them are so varied.

Developing countries will have to protect the just principles of climate negotiations and fight for even the smallest of interests. Climate change has become an accepted part of political discourse, but that does not mean, as some Chinese academics have suggested, that we should adopt mandatory emission targets too soon and surrender our development rights and future environmental capacity.

Emerging nations have already made remarkable efforts with voluntary emissions reductions, but it is hard to convince the developed world that these countries are already doing as much as they can. Red lines aside, emerging nations must let the climate diplomats know that we need, support and, as far as possible, will adopt measures to ensure humanity’s success in the battle against climate change – but, crucially, we should not fear pressure and demands that are beyond our ability to meet.

Tang Wei is assistant researcher at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences’ Ecological Economics and Sustainable Development Institute.

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Briefing: the Copenhagen Accord

Tan Copsey — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 10:32:00 +0000

What happened at the COP15 climate talks? Tan Copsey explains the new agreement.

After two chaotic weeks, 188 countries reached a limited agreement in Copenhagen to continue global efforts to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases in order to address climate change.

The talks were quite unlike the more ceremonial proceedings at the 1992 conference in Rio that founded the United Nations climate-change process, and less fruitful than the 1997 negotiations that produced the legally binding Kyoto Protocol. The final, frantic negotiations featured unprecedented engagement between heads of state; an angry showdown between a British minister and the leader of the G77 group of developing nations over comparisons between the agreement and the Holocaust; and a bloody-fisted Venezuelan negotiator demanding that she be heard.

Many members of environmental civil society reacted angrily to the deal, known as the “Copenhagen Accord”. Malini Mehra of the Centre for Social Markets suggested that it “may well prove to be the Munich Agreement of modern times”, referring to the appeasement strategy that allowed Nazi Germany to annex parts of Czechoslovakia. Bill McKibben, founder of 350.org – a campaign to limit atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases – suggested that the deal had destroyed the United Nations.

The Copenhagen Accord is a short document of around 1,400 words, limited in detail and ambition. Though it is largely in line with the text of the 1992 Framework Convention on Climate Change, it is not legally binding. The agreement also reflects a new political reality in which the pursuit of either a second phase of the Kyoto Protocol or a new, legally-binding Copenhagen agreement now appears unlikely. The 2007 climate talks in Bali created a roadmap towards a future agreement. Alex Evans, of the Center on International Cooperation at New York University, has described the Copenhagen Accord as “Bali 2”, since it is limited to repeating many of the goals set out in the Bali Action Plan, in place of making progress on them.

Though the accord formally recognises that average global temperatures should not be allowed to rise by more than two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, it is not substantial enough to suggest that such a goal is achievable. Signatories “commit to implement .... quantified economy-wide emissions targets for 2020”, but these targets are self-determined and the targets submitted by the United States or China, for instance, are likely contribute to warming of more than two degrees.

Copenhagen saw some progress on providing finance to developing nations. “New and additional, predictable and adequate funding” will be provided to developing nations for emissions mitigation, reducing deforestation, technology development and transfer and adaptation. Up to US$30 billion will be provided between 2010 and 2012. Developed countries also committed to find a more substantial $100 billion by 2020. A significant portion of financing will flow through a newly established Copenhagen Green Climate Fund.

Compromise was also reached on the issue of monitoring the “nationally appropriate actions” taken on by developing nations – for instance, China’s target to reduce carbon intensity. Determining how these actions would be “measurable, reportable and verifiable” (MRV) was a sticking point in the negotiations. Many developing nations, particularly China, are wary of the prospect of intrusive international monitoring of industry. The accord allows for “domestic measurement, reporting and verification”, but requires that this be reported “through national communications, with international consultation and analysis.”

The United States and China, the world's largest historical contributor to climate change and the world's largest current emitter, were at the heart of the failure to reach a more substantial agreement. Negotiators for the United States rejected the possibility that they might surpass the targets currently being debated in the senate – despite the fact these targets are considerably weaker than those of most developed country counterparts. China remained closed to the possibility that after 2020, the country might take on binding emissions caps – or that it should set a target for the year at which its emissions peak.

Not every developing nation supported this position. Tuvalu, a small island nation – most of which is no more than one-metre above sea level – staged a dramatic intervention during the first week of the conference. Echoing the cries of other small island states, Tuvalu called for the formation of a “Copenhagen Protocol”, including ambitious targets to limit atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases to 350 parts per million (ppm), as opposed to the 450ppm recommended by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and temperature rise to no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius. China rejected this proposal as it would have required Chinese emissions to peak very soon.

Further fractures between the previously aligned positions of developing nations became evident during the final days of the conference. A group of nations, including Sudan – which currently holds the presidency of the G77 – and a collection of Latin American nations refused to sign the accord. Cuban foreign minister Bruno Rodriguez denounced the accord, suggesting it was the work of an “imperial” and “arrogant” United States. China has since accused developed nations of “fomenting discord” among developing nations. But an obvious division has now emerged between the positions of more advanced developing nations – China, India, Brazil and South Africa – and the most vulnerable, least developed nations. This may explain why the US president Barack Obama chose to emphasise the crucial role that these emerging economies played in helping to reach a deal.

The accord had significant implications for the future of the Kyoto Protocol. It drew the contours of a largely voluntary system, quite unlike the top-down, legally binding and international Kyoto Protocol, which allowed emissions trading between states and included a variety of flexible market mechanisms. If the agreement is used as a foundation in the coming months, then the prospect of nations complying with the Kyoto Protocol is likely to recede. Canada, already drastically above its Kyoto target, will have little incentive to purchase credits to offset this rise. Russia, which holds a surplus of these credits, will be a lot poorer.

Neither is this a good deal for those seeking to invest in renewable energy or clean technologies. Investors are faced with an uncertain terrain of diverse national policies on climate change. This creates an uneven playing field and increases the possibility of high-carbon industries “leaking” to those countries with less stringent policies; and some countries imposing tariffs on carbon-intensive imports. Carbon prices fell to a six-month low shortly after the talks; the long-term outlook for international emissions trading now seems bleak. The accord will also frustrate those expected Copenhagen would see real progress on reforming or extending the much-criticised Clean Development Mechanism.

Finally Some nations, including the United Kingdom, are looking toward the next global climate-change summit in Mexico City next November, in the hope there is an opportunity to turn this basic agreement into a full, legally-binding treaty. But as Yvo de Boer – the man in charge of the process – put it: “We have a lot of work to do on the road to Mexico.” The next step will come sooner, at the end of January, when the developed nations that signed the Copenhagen Accord are required to submit economy-wide emissions targets to the United Nations.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, de Boer was a rare optimistic voice amid the clamour of blame and recrimination. “Never before have we seen so many world leaders gathered in the stride for the climate,” he said. “Even though it appeared to be very difficult [to get an agreement] 115 heads of state or governments chose to come to Copenhagen and engage. This is what we need to build on.” But for many, a question mark remains over the accord itself, and whether it is secure ground on which to build.

Tan Copsey is development manager at chinadialogue

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To seal a deal, we need justice

Jun Ma — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 12:59:00 +0000

A legally binding agreement seems beyond reach at Copenhagen. Ma Jun blames an inability to balance the need for efficiency with the principle of equity.

Climate change is one of the most complex challenges that faces the world today. The fact that international society has come together to negotiate a plan to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions after 2012 reflects the progress of human civilisation. However, the gap in the positions of the developing countries and developed nations remains so wide at this point in the Copenhagen negotiations that a legally binding agreement seems beyond reach. It will be very difficult to bridge such a major gap merely through technical adjustments. Instead, the major stakeholders should return to the fundamental concepts of equity and efficiency if they want to escape this predicament.

There are different views about how to approach the environmental principle of “common but differentiated responsibilities.” Research shows that the emissions of developed countries in their industrialisation over the past 150 years are the primary cause of current climate-change impacts. Therefore, developing countries argue that industrialised nations should be legally obliged to reduce their emissions. At the same time, the rights of developing countries to improve their livelihoods through economic development should be respected – and there should not be mandatory emissions curbs for these poor countries. However, developed countries doubt that such a plan could successfully address climate change. They argue that their emissions reductions would be quickly offset by the rising emissions of major developing countries, such as China and India, whose scale of carbon dioxide emissions has substantially increased in recent years.

This is the problem: if one considers environmental justice, developed countries should take responsibility for their historical emissions and developing nations should not have to take action from the same starting point. However, if one considers effectiveness and efficiency, the world cannot prevent the dangerous consequences of climate change without developing countries making immediate efforts to slow their rising emissions. There is a conflict between equity and efficiency in the fight against global warming.

With such a global issue that is critical to humanity’s future, we should not sacrifice efficiency for the sake of equity – we cannot afford the risk of climate disaster. But neither can we sacrifice justice for the sake of efficiency – a deal not based on the principle of equity could not be implemented or enforced. A major pathway to balance efficiency with equity – and resolve conflicting interests – is to require that developed countries transfer technology and funds to help developing countries to take immediate action.

But such promises have not materialised, despite having been on the agenda since 1992. This is why many developing countries insist that a deal cannot be reached without this problem being resolved. It is still the most contentious issue at the climate talks. The amount of money that developed countries are willing to provide is very limited – it is worlds away from the expectations of developing nations. The United States have said they will not provide China with finance to reduce emissions; a Chinese negotiator responded that this statement “lacks common sense.”

This sharp contrast in positions shows that the United States and some other western nations still want to shirk their responsibilities; they are not ready to reach a deal based on global environmental justice. Some do not even have the guts to recognise who is responsible for today’s climate problems. That is why some industrialised countries have made legally binding emissions reductions for developing nations a precondition of their commitment. That is why some industrialised countries think financial support for developing nations is a kind of charity – when, in fact, it is compensation for the mess they have created over the past 150 years.

If we want to coordinate the positions of both sides of the argument, developed countries must recognise their responsibility for historical emissions. Based on the principle of balancing efficiency and equity, we should plan to provide financial support for developing countries in the following ways. Based on the precondition that the limit on the rise of the average global temperature – of 1.5 or 2 degrees Celsius – should be stringently enforced, every developed country should shoulder its historic duty and set legally binding targets for deep emissions cuts, especially those countries that did not ratify the Kyoto Protocol. Meanwhile, the least developed nations should be helped in their mitigation and adaptation efforts. Large developing nations like China and India should adopt voluntary action plans to reduce emissions. If an industrialised country is having difficulties reaching its emissions targets and needs help from developing countries to meet them, then developed countries should provide full funding to support developing countries make extra cuts beyond their voluntary emission targets. Once such a multi-billion dollar climate fund has been established, an appropriate supervisory system should be put in place to ensure the funds are used effectively, and are not misused or embezzled.

There is no doubt that the largest obstacle at Copenhagen is the failure of developed nations to recognise their historical responsibilities. However, developing countries should not wait around: they should actively improve their own governance structures in order to build open, transparent and participatory supervisory systems. This is not only important for socio-economic development in poor countries, but it will also boost the confidence of other stakeholders in the effective use of future climate funding. After all, the fundamental issue is that debts are paid, but that we prevent dangerous climate change. If funds for emissions reductions were misused, then humanity would miss its last opportunity to stop climate change.

Ma Jun is director of the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs. Sabrina Orlins and Wang Jingjing assisted the translation.

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A political ill wind blows

Tim Harford — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 14:12:00 +0000

Governments meeting in Copenhagen have taken the wrong approach to climate change, says Tim Harford. They should be working to increase the price that polluters pay for emissions.

My sunny disposition wavered as the Copenhagen summit on climate change approached. I believe that the governments of the world have taken the wrong approach to the problem – and if they had taken a different tack 12 years ago in Kyoto, we would be much closer to dealing credibly with climate change.

The complexities are dizzying, so it may help to be reductive for a moment. The governments of the world are focusing on reducing the quantity of greenhouse gases emitted, through cap-and-trade programmes; they should instead be focusing on increasing the price polluters must pay for emissions. The incentives provided by the two approaches are similar. Both will lead to a higher carbon price and lower emissions, and both could be tweaked over time to produce much the same trajectory of lower emissions. Either system would work well from an economic perspective.

Yet politically speaking, cap-and-trade – where an agreed cap on the level of pollution permitted in a region is set, within which companies can trade those permits between themselves so long as the cap is not exceeded – has long been regarded as the easier sell. I am not convinced it deserves that reputation. There are already several technically successful cap-and-trade schemes, but none requiring anything like the political compromises now necessary. The Kyoto Protocol, a quantity-based agreement on emissions, effectively died in the United States long before George W Bush became president, took eight years to come into force and could not meaningfully accommodate China, India, Indonesia or Brazil. This is hardly auspicious.

The trouble with cap-and-trade is that countries must agree how to divide the allocation of permits. This has proved troublesome when emissions targets were assigned relative to a 1990 baseline. Rapid growth in the US economy suddenly made its allocation look stingy, while the Russian allocation looked absurdly lax following the economy’s collapse in the early 1990s. It should not have been a surprise that some economies would grow faster or slower than predicted.

Gabrielle Walker and Sir David King, in their otherwise superb book on climate change, The Hot Topic, assert the conventional wisdom that cap-and-trade is politically more achievable. This statement is somewhat undermined as they start to describe the political prerequisites for such a deal, which include agreement on a global emissions cap (a hugely contentious question) and the distribution of emissions rights among countries.

There is a form of carbon tax that would be far simpler – and would not, contrary to Walker and King’s implication, be levied by the World Bank. G20 members would agree to impose a broad-based carbon tax on their own economies. The tax would be levied by national governments and spent as they saw fit. Precise harmonisation would be unnecessary. The taxes would simply need to be broadly in line, with a commitment to keep them that way.

Cameron Hepburn, co-editor of The Economics and Politics of Climate Change, points out that quantity regulation puts knotty issues of distribution and compensation at the heart of the international negotiations. Harmonised carbon taxes put these questions to one side. They could be – and would have to be – discussed separately. Perhaps a carbon tax is the wrong approach, and it is all for the best that the whole sorry mess will be on the table at Copenhagen. That is the path the world’s governments have chosen. I sincerely hope that they are right.

Tim Harford writes “The Undercover Economist” column in the FT Weekend Magazine of the Financial Times. His latest book is Dear Undercover Economist (Little, Brown).

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