World is Green

In the current climate change discussions, China and India raise red flags everywhere. The general points are that they are the fastest growing developing countries and hence, their emissions need to be decreased or the growth of emissions needs to be decreased. In fact, Australia and the US claim to not signing the Kyoto Protocol due to the lack of emission reduction targets on China and India.

China and India on the other hand claim their per capita emissions, their poverty and the need for economic development as the drivers for not accepting to targets for CO2 reduction.

One common reason suggested for the worry is that China will eclipse the United States as the leading greenhouse gas emitter soon . The developed countries are looking into the future. However, if you look at the past, it is clear who bears the responsibility. A good way to understand this is the cumulative emissions of countries from 1900 to 2002.

The linked graph shows the cumulative CO2 emissions from 1900 to 2002.

Writing on the logic of doing it, the author suggests:

It does make sense to look at the sum of all CO2 emissions because the lifetime of the greenhouse gases like CO2 in the atmosphere is between 50 and 200 years. The current global warming is an effect of all greenhouse gases put in the atmosphere during the last 100 years, global warming is not just caused by the greenhouse gases emitted this year or last year! This is also one of the reasons why immediate action is required to reduce the emission of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide, because the effects of the greenhouse gases will last for about 100 years.

A better way to understand the issue is to concentrate on the Top 10 producers of all time.

The US is responsible for 41% of all the emissions for the last hundred years produced by the top 10 countries. China only 11%. India 3%. This puts things in perspective.

(Click the link below for the rest of the entry)

Peter Ford writes in the Christian Science Monitor (Hat tip: Chinalyst) about the growing Chinese carbon footprint and China’s acknowledgement for the need to change.

“Climate change has become a huge challenge to China’s social and economic sustained development,” Zheng Guoguang, head of the China Meteorological Administration, said Monday. “China is determined to mitigate and respond to climate change as a responsible nation.”The signals of how it will do so are mixed. On the one hand, Premier Wen Jiabao announced earlier this month, on a visit to Japan, that his country would “proactively participate in building an effective framework from 2013″ to replace the Kyoto Protocol’s binding targets for greenhouse-gas reductions.

If nothing were done, within 25 years China’s emissions would be double the combined output of all industrialized nations, said Fatih Birol, the IEA’s chief economist. That is largely because China is fueling its growth with coal, a noxious source of CO2 and other pollutants. As the largest producer and consumer of coal in the world, China uses the fossil fuel to generate 69 percent of its primary energy, according to official figures.

Water shortages and high temperatures could reduce harvests by 10 percent by 2030; wheat, rice, and corn output could collapse by as much as 37 percent after 2050, the report says. “If we do not take any action, climate change will seriously damage China’s long-term grain security.”

Such grim prospects have prompted the government to set its own emissions goals. Most ambitiously, the new assessment pledges to reduce CO2 emissions per unit of GDP by 80 percent by 2050.

En route, the authorities are aiming for a 20 percent drop in energy use per GDP unit by 2010 – slightly more ambitious than President Bush’s hope that US industry will voluntarily cut its emissions intensity by 18 percent by 2012.

As the Union of Concerned Scientists point out,

…developed countries lead in total carbon emissions and carbon emissions per capita, while developing countries lead in the growth rate of carbon emissions. Obviously, these uneven contributions to the climate problem are at the core of the challenges the world community faces in finding effective and equitable solutions.

Where do we go from here? Wu Ming at Surf Putah offers some interesting ideas:

In the end, any solution for global warming will have to be enacted in both China and America in order to succeed, and it will have to cut the gordian knot of economic growth and pollution. Our two countries are so deeply interconnected that they might as well be treated as one huge economy, with a globally segmented process of production. In particular, both countries are going to have to start factoring the cost of environmental damage (and the flip side, the value of an intact environment) into their economic calculus, probably in an overt carbon tax sort of set up. While the particulars of the two countries are in many ways quite different (America is outsourcing its pollution along withmost of its industrial base, China is insourcing both; America burns oil for transportation, China uses it to make plastics; America has a huge per capita emissions rate, China’s per capita energy use is still quite low, even though the total amount is huge), at its heart the neoliberal, growth-focused economies powered primarily by coal and oil will have to change, and radically. The silver lining here is that if we do this right, and cooperate to come up with a new solution, it could make both countries a lot of money, as solutions are sold to the rest of the world.

Both countries have a wealth of natural resources in their wind, sun, tides and other untapped founts of alternative green energy, should they care to take advantage of them. Both countries have a ton of engineers and problem solvers to draw upon. The solution is right out there for the taking, as Chinese Democracy Wall activist Wei Jingsheng noted decades ago when serving time in a prison camp in the sunny, windy western province of Qinghai. All we lack is the sense of urgency and the will to think outside the iron box of the status quo.

Two things need to happen. We need to move ahead of Climate Change and look at the whole sustainability issue and the other, look at this issue as an opportunity for future economic growth.

One example of this is the Jiangsu province of China. China Dialogue has more on this green province.

Located on the lower reaches of the Yangtze River and Huai River, and with a coastline on the Yellow Sea, Jiangsu is less than half the size of the UK, at 100,000 square kilometres, but has a population of 75 million – much higher than Britain’s 60 million.

Jiangsu’s contribution to China’s gross domestic product (GDP) has consistently ranked among the country’s top three provinces. The province’s economic growth in 2006 was 14.9%, China’s highest. Last year, it was also one of only two provinces that met national targets on pollution reduction and energy efficiency.

In 2006, emissions of major pollutants in Jiangsu province dropped by 3.3%, far surpassing the national target of 2%. Jiangsu’s power consumption per unit of GPD also fell by 4.02%, just over the target of 4%.

Four of the six cities that were first awarded the title of “Ecological City” by China’s State Council are in Jiangsu province. All four – Zhangjiagang, Changshu, Kunshang and Jiangyin – are among China’s ten richest city and county-level economies.

Of particular interest are Jiangsu’s environmental pricing reforms, which include emissions trading and emissions pricing policies. Jiangsu’s city of Nantong was the first place in China to adopt an emissions trading scheme; and in 2002, the system was rolled out across the entire province.