Industry Headlines
China Issues Plan On
Global Warming, Rejecting Mandatory Caps On Greenhouse
Gases
June 5, 2007
The New
York Times
By JIM YARDLEY and ANDREW C. REVKIN
BEIJING — With global warming high
on the agenda for the world’s industrial powers
gathering later this week in Germany, China staked out
its position on Monday by releasing its first national
strategy on climate change, a plan that promises to
improve energy efficiency but rejects any mandatory caps
on greenhouse gas emissions.
The 62-page plan, two years in the making, served at
least partly as a rebuff to separate efforts by
President Bush and European nations to draw China and
other developing countries into a commitment to reduce
emissions, which was expected to be a focal point at the
expanded summit meeting of the Group of 8
industrialized nations.
China has resisted mandatory reductions in emissions,
arguing that it is still a developing country and needs
to balance environmental improvements with maintaining
economic growth.
President Bush, trying to blunt criticism of his own
record on global warming, proposed last Thursday a new
negotiating framework in which the 15 countries that
produce the most greenhouse gas emissions would meet
this fall in Washington. Each country would establish
its own targets and plan to slow emissions in the next
10 or 20 years, while the group would work to set a
long-term global goal for substantially cutting
emissions.
But some experts say the Bush administration’s
approach is compromised because, like China, the United
States opposes a mandatory cap on its emissions.
“China is not going to act in any sort of
mandatory-control way until the United States does
first,” said Joseph Kruger, policy director for the
National Commission on Energy Policy, a bipartisan group
in Washington.
Along with India and other large developing
countries, China has long maintained that the
established industrial powers need to act first because
they built their wealth largely by burning fossil fuels
and adding to the atmosphere’s blanket of greenhouse
gases.
“Our general stance is that China will not commit to
any quantified emissions reduction targets, but that
does not mean we will not assume responsibilities in
responding to climate change,” said Ma Kai, head of
China’s powerful economic planning agency, the National
Development and Reform Commission.
The report unveiled by Mr. Ma emphasizes trying to
control greenhouse gas emissions by improving energy
efficiency by 20 percent by 2010. But, in broad terms,
the plan merely restates Beijing’s position that
mandatory emissions caps are unfair to China and other
developing countries still trying to modernize and
improve living standards.
China, with the world’s fastest-growing major
economy, had been projected to surpass the United States
by 2009 or 2010 as the world’s biggest emitter of
greenhouse gases, particularly carbon dioxide, which
scientists say cause global warming. But China’s
coal-based, high-polluting economy is growing so rapidly
that the chief economist for the International Energy
Agency is now predicting the country could become the
global emissions leader as soon as this year.
Fatih Birol, the agency’s chief economist, warned
that China must begin curbing its current rate of
emissions. If not, he predicted that within 25 years
China’s output of carbon dioxide emissions could amount
to twice the combined emissions of the world’s richest
nations — including the United States, members of the European Union and
Japan.
At his news conference on Monday, Mr. Ma applauded
Mr. Bush’s proposal but emphasized that any effort in
Washington should complement, not replace, the existing
framework, including the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, sponsored
by the United Nations.
Under the Kyoto Protocol, participating industrialized
nations are subjected to caps on carbon dioxide and
other greenhouse gases, while developing countries,
including China and India, are exempt.
The Bush administration rejected the agreement
because of those exemptions, and said the cuts would
harm its economy.
Mr. Ma stressed that as a latecomer to
industrialization, China had produced only a small
fraction of the world’s greenhouse gases, and that its
current per capita emissions equaled a small fraction of
the rate in the United States.
Mr. Birol, the I.E.A. economist, agreed that the
developed world was responsible for the bulk of
emissions and should play a leading role in finding a
solution. But he said that no plan could succeed without
a major role for China and that making distinctions
between “total emissions” and “per capita emissions”
obscured the larger point.
“The atmosphere does not make a distinction if it is
cumulative or a per capita emission,” Mr. Birol said in
a telephone interview. “Either way, it is a problem for
all of us.”
The centerpiece of China’s approach to controlling
emissions is an existing plan that calls for a 20
percent improvement in energy efficiency between 2006
and 2010. Mr. Ma noted that China had passed new laws on
environmental protection and energy efficiency, and that
factories across the country were beginning to improve.
He said fiscal and tax policies were being revised to
reward clean industry and punish high-polluting
factories.
But given China’s high economic growth rate, the
energy efficiency program would, at best, slow increases
in emissions rather than reduce them. And it is far from
certain that China will be able to meet the 20 percent
goal. Under the plan, China should have netted a 4
percent reduction in 2006 in the amount of energy needed
to generate each unit of gross domestic product.
Instead, environmental officials announced earlier this
year that the country had failed to meet that goal.
China is heavily dependent on coal, which currently
accounts for about 68 percent of its energy. Under the
climate change program, China is planning a major
expansion of nuclear power, as well as renewable energy
sources. The plan calls for renewable energy to account
for 10 percent of the country’s power supply by 2010.
China is also in the midst of a nationwide reforestation
program to help absorb greenhouse gases.
Jonathan Lash, president of the World Resources
Institute, said that while it was clear that China was
aware of looming climate risks, the central government
lacked the legal structures and institutions to enforce
a mandatory emissions cap.
“The central government can’t control what gets
built,” he said, noting the example of illegal factories
for making coke used by the steel industry that were
closed and repeatedly reopened.
James L. Connaughton, the lead White House official
on the environment, said last week that a central goal
of the Bush administration’s new plan is to reach out to
China, India, Korea and other fast-growing Asian
countries to help eliminate barriers to emissions cuts,
including the high tariffs China now charges on imported
pollution-controlling technology.
In return, he said, wealthy countries could offer
developing countries new energy technologies created
with government research money at a discount.
Mr. Connaughton said that one vital tool,
particularly given China’s exploding use of coal, would
be the development of systems for capturing carbon
dioxide, the main greenhouse gas from burning fuel, and
pumping it underground.
“China will use four times more coal than the United
States by the end of 2020,” he said. “We have to
accelerate producing power from coal without
emissions.”
Jim Yardley reported from Beijing, and Andrew C.
Revkin from New York.
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