The Green Leap Forward 绿跃进

What do China and Frank Sinatra have in common?

To find out, read this guest post by Scott Moore, a Rhodes Scholar at the Environmental Change Institute of the University of Oxford.  Scott was previously a Fulbright Fellow at the College of Environmental Science and Engineering at Peking University in 2008-2009.  Scott and I co-wrote an op-ed in China Daily back in April.  Scott blogs at China GreenSpace and is currently at COP15 in Copenhagen.

If you’re searching for vision at this week’s Copenhagen climate conference, take a look between the lines at what China’s saying on global warming. From increasing the share of renewable energy to promoting a new “low-carbon mentality” among its citizens, China has made a name for itself as the first industrializing country — ever — to make serious efforts to limit the contribution of its economic development to climate change. By some estimates, these measures will reduce China’s emissions by an amount greater than the total reductions achieved by all parties under the Kyoto Protocol.

But the revolution Beijing is proposing, in Copenhagen and elsewhere, goes deeper than this. China’s government knows it must continue to provide tangible increases in the standard of living of its citizens. Once, this largely meant ramping up investment in industry and infrastructure. Increasingly, however, improving the standard of living means taking the edge off of torrid economic growth– narrowing income disparities, improving social services, and cleaning China’s famously dirty skies and waterways.

China’s leadership has decided, therefore, that it must move up the socio-economic value chain, and quickly. Traditional heavy industry, and the highly-polluting, resource-intensive model of development which sustains it, will be replaced by a vision of nimble green enterprises, poised to lead China into the world’s economic future. At Copenhagen, China’s leaders make no secret of this ambition: they speak of building an energy system which is less polluting, more secure, and more efficient, and of an “innovative” development pattern that is higher-quality and lower-emitting.

But this, larger story seems lost on most of the delegates at Copenhagen, and on commentators beyond. Instead, coverage of China’s climate policies, including its recently-announced pledge to decrease the carbon intensity of every unit of production, is dominated by debates over their rigor. These are by no means trivial questions, but they risk masking the larger issue: what does China’s proposed transformation, from low-cost workshop of the world to high-tech laboratory, mean in terms of the country’s overall development?

The first, most obvious implication, is that China’s green transformation will be very much on its own terms (Recall Sintra: “I did it myyyyy wayyyy”). While the policies Beijing has enacted to underpin a green economy have co-benefits for reducing emissions, they are not calculated to save the planet. Instead, they are meant to decrease air and water pollution, improve resource security, and decrease the demand for natural resources to fuel China’s development. The Earth’s climate may benefit from these policies, but Chinese interests come in distincly ahead. This is most clearly evident in China’s pursuit of energy security. While the country will expand the use of renewable energy, but it is also gearing up to mine and burn gas hydrates, which are nearly one-hundred percent methane, and hence even worse for the climate than burning coal.

Second, friction between China and other countries over economic issues is likely to intensify. Tariffs, levied in response to Chinese non-compliance in a future global climate regime, are almost certain to be kept in US climate legislation. China seems equally determined to oppose what it calls “green protectionism.” Moreover, there is a basic conflict in the rush by many countries to lead in a future green economy. China, America, the UK and others have all declared that green technologies will be central to their economic futures. While the green economy pie of the twenty-first century may indeed be large, it will almost certainly not be large enough to satisfy the economic ambitions of all these nations. As in all economic transformations, some countries will profit hugely from a green future– but not all. Expect a great deal of discord at future summits as a result.

China, laudably, has taken bold steps in outlining a path to environmentally sustainable economic growth, a path which certainly eluded the Western industrialized countries in the past. But its interests go much further. China has no desire to maintain an inefficent, dirty manufacutring base. It seeks nothing short of a leap into the leading rank of nations. The climate may benefit as a result– but is the rest of the world ready for what a green dragon really means?

December 16th, 2009 | Tags: China, climate change, energy, environment, Scott Moore | Category: climate change | Subscribe to comments | Leave a comment | Trackback URL