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Jeff Goodell, who’s written fine books on “big coal” and the batch of climate-manipulating ideas known as geo-engineering, has written an invaluable feature on China’s energy and climate plans for Rolling Stone: “China, the Climate and the Fate of the Planet.”

The piece centers on Secretary of State John Kerry’s trip to China in July, and thus appropriately casts China’s policy choices on greenhouse gases and its deep dependence on coal in the broader context of the never-ending “you first” dance between these two greenhouse-gas giants. Read on for a couple of excerpts, but please click the link at the end and explore the full story (which includes a fund tidbit about Kerry’s guitar passion):

The piece is particularly important reading ahead of the United Nations climate “summit” early next week (an event that China’s top leadership is skipping, along with India’s and Australia’s). Goodell’s reporting reinforces the case made recently by former United States senators Tim Wirth and Tom Daschle, who seek a softer approach to climate treaty negotiations despite continuing calls for a new binding agreement late next year in Paris.

Goodell discusses several trends that hint an agreement is more achievable now than a few years ago, including this one:

China is in the midst of a profound economic and social transformation, trying to reinvent itself from an economy based on selling cheap goods overseas to an economy based on selling quality consumer goods at home, while keeping growth rates high and cutting dependence on fossil fuels. Energy demand is expected to double by 2030, and at that pace, there is not enough oil, coal and gas in the world to keep their economy humming. So China’s ongoing energy security depends on the nation developing alternative energy sources in a big way. “We need more of everything,” says Peggy Liu, a sustainability leader who works across China. “Wind, solar, a modernized grid. We need to leapfrog over the past and into a clean-energy future.” China’s leaders are also waking up to the fact that recent decades of hypergrowth, most of it fired by coal, have exacted a steep price. Air pollution in China’s big cities is among the worst in the world; one recent report found that poor air quality contributed to 1.2 million premature deaths in 2010. As Hank Paulson, former Secretary of the Treasury and longtime China observer, has put it, “What is another point of GDP worth, if dirty air is killing people?”

He adds:

Chinese leaders know this trajectory is unsustainable – economically and politically. Earlier this year, Premier Li Keqiang “declared war” on pollution. Party leaders in China now routinely talk about the importance of “rebalancing the economy” and creating an “ecological civilization.” China Daily, the Communist Party house organ, regularly runs stories about air pollution and toxic waste. While I was in Beijing, I asked U.S. Ambassador to China Max Baucus why the Chinese were now willing to talk so openly about environmental issues. “The fragility of their government,” he said bluntly. “They will have a social revolt on their hands if they don’t come up with a way of dealing with this.”

Drawing on reporting he did earlier this year at one of the unofficial rounds of climate talks in Bonn, Germany (been there, done that, my sympathies), Goodell writes:

The Paris agreement will largely be a “bottom up” treaty, in which each country will put forward a “contribution” for what each is willing to do to reduce carbon pollution. Those contributions will then be reviewed in the future – exactly how and by whom isn’t clear – to make sure each nation is keeping its promise. There will be no legally binding caps on emissions, no mandated “targets” that countries need to reach. In fact, it will not be a treaty at all (a treaty would need to be ratified by the U.S. Senate, which everyone knows will never happen). It will likely be an agreement “with legal force,” which means, basically, that some parts of the agreement might be legally binding in some countries.

Drawing on that Bonn visit, he recalls a telling discussion with Zou Ji, a top Chinese climate strategist (for more, see my video intervierw with Zou Ji here):

I got a preview of the kind of arguments U.S. negotiators will face when I bumped into Zou Ji, the deputy director general for the National Center for Climate Change Strategy and International Cooperation and a key member of the Chinese negotiating team, in the lobby of the Maritim Hotel. I asked him if the recent action by Obama to limit pollution from power plants and increase fuel-efficiency standards had changed the dynamics in the negotiations. “It is a good thing,” Ji told me. “But now, America says to us, ‘Your turn to step up.’ Well, we welcome what you have done, but we want to see more action from the U.S. first. It is very clear that Congress is a big constraint for you; Obama can only do what he can do.” Ji argues, accurately, that the U.S. is still the far richer country, and while China’s carbon emissions are enormous, if you break it down to per-capita emissions, the average American is responsible for dumping almost three times as much CO2 into the atmosphere every year as the average Chinese. I point out to him that this is true, but that cumulative emissions in China will soon dwarf those in the United States. “China needs to do its part, but right now the U.S. still has huge potential to do more,” he says forcefully. “I have lived in the U.S., where everyone has a clothes dryer and an air conditioner and a big refrigerator and a big house and a big car. In the EU and Japan, they also live well, but people there only consume half the energy Americans do. You do have the capacity to live at the same standard and consume far less – if you choose.”

The bottom line? You first.



Please do read the whole piece here.