China Environmental Law

What to make of the conflicting signals in the press regarding China’s stance during the next round of climate change negotiations?At the beginning of the month Reuters reported that

Hu Angang, a public policy professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing, warned failure to act could doom global climate change talks.

In submissions to leaders and a recent essay, Hu has argued China could emerge an economic and diplomatic winner if it vows to cut gases from industry, farms and transport that are trapping increasingly dangerous levels of solar heat in the atmosphere.

“It’s in China’s own interest to accept greenhouse gas emissions goals, not just in the international interest,” Hu told Reuters in an interview on Sunday [September 7].

Under Professor Hu’s scheme, as proposed in the Chinese-language Journal of Contemporary Asia-Pacific Studies,

China’s greenhouse gas pollution would continue rising until around 2020.

The country would then “dramatically” curtail emissions, cutting them by 2030 to the level they were in 1990 and then half that by 2050. China’s greenhouse gas emissions amounted to 3.7 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide in 1994.

Hu advocates the unilateral adoption of these limits even if the United States refuses to sign a future climate change agreement.

As the Green Leap Forward (GLF) has noted, Hu is figure to be reckoned with.  GLF notes a number of policy initiatives he has been instrumental in advancing, although by his own admission, he’s “always started out in the minority but ended up as the mainstream.”

Hu may have been a bit too far off the reservation in a bit too public a manner this time.  Without explicitly referencing Hu, China Daily, part of China’s state-run media, ran an article on Friday, by “one of China’s leading negotiators on climate change,” that takes a much harder line on China’s position in climate change talks.

Lin Erda, who in addition to his negotiator duties is identified by China Daily as “one of the 12 members of the National Expert Committee for Climate Change” and “the country’s top expert on climate change,” has proposed that

China should reduce its greenhouse gas emissions once developed countries cut their per capita level of emissions to its [China's] current levels.

“If developed countries can cut its per capita emissions to China’s level, it means they have really good technology,” Lin said. “Then China would like to take appropriate actions to reduce emissions after they (developed countries) fulfill their obligations for technology transfer.”

Take that Professor Hu! 

While the numbers are hard to calculate and making exact comparisons is difficult, China’s per capita GHG emissions are 20% to one third less than those of  most developed countries.  Thus, while the China is certainly justified in pointing out the per capita disparity as a significant point in its favor in any negotiations, a proposal which requires developed countries to reduce their per capital GHG emission levels to Chinese levels is a complete non-starter. 

China, of course, knows this, so the only reason for publishing the provocative comments of Mr. Lin must be to counterbalance those of Professor Hu.  This way China can say there are “extremist” on both sides within its negotiating camp, but it will try to adhere to a middle ground.  The exact contours of that middle ground are still unclear, but they will certainly require, as even Mr. Hu acknowledges, massive “infusions of pollution-reducing technology from advanced economies” as well as cash.