China Environmental Law

For today’s reading let me send you over to Climate Progress.  Climate Progress is

dedicated to providing the progressive perspective on climate science, climate solutions, and climate politics. It is a project of the Center for American Progress Action Fund, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization.

It is edited by Joseph Romm, a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress.  He was acting assistant secretary of energy for energy efficiency and renewable energy during the Clinton Administration.

Read all the posts and subscribe to the feed, but readers of this blog may be most interested in this post by Robert Collier : “Can China go green?“   Here’s the opening paragraph:

After Saturday’s sputtering end of the U.N. climate talks in Poznan, Poland, it’s clearer than ever that the fate of the post-Kyoto negotiations will depend on whether China can be coaxed to adopt some sort of carbon emissions limits. But as this tug of war plays out in the next year and beyond, what’s most important is not what China says on the diplomatic front but what it does on the home front.

The whole article is well-worth your time (and don’t miss the nice reference to CELB). 

An interlineation by Joseph Romm raises a good point and one that we touched on in our last post.

I would add that China’s energy intensity target is no more meaningful than Bush’s carbon intensity target (see “Bush Touts Meaningless Greenhouse Gas Targets While Making his Double-U-Turn on Climate“). So what if China reduces its annual energy use per unit GDP by 4% if its GDP is rising 8% to 10% a year and the resulting 4% to 6% growth in energy is met primarily by coal?

As we noted in yesterday’s post, the expert commentators on Shanghai’s 4^th environmental three-year plan were in “unanimous agreement that intensity targets are wholly inadequate to achieve pollution reduction tasks.  Some experts called for Shanghai to set a ceiling on the consumption of energy.” 

As Robert Collier notes those in positions of responsibility in China are “no longer ignoring” the problem of climate change.  The issue we all should be addressing is how to develop a post-Kyoto solution which doesn’t spook China into thinking that its economic growth (and thus political stability) will be imperiled, but results in real carbon emissions limits.