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The United States is off the hook: last year China overtook the US
to become the world's biggest emitter of carbon dioxide. "The tall tree
attracts the wind," and from now on China will be the main target of the
criticism that used to be directed at the United States for refusing to
accept binding limits on its greenhouse gas emissions.
What's particularly striking is the speed with which China has
passed the United States. In 2005 its CO2 emissions were two percent lower
than those of the US; in 2006 they were eight percent higher. Yet China
only has four times the population of the United States, and the average
Chinese in nothing like a quarter as rich as the average American. In fact,
the vast majority of Chinese don't even own cars. So why does China produce
so much CO2?
One reason is cement. The pace of building in China is so intense
that the country produces 44 percent of the world's cement (the US produces
4 percent), and cement production is a major source of greenhouse gases.
The main culprit, however, is coal, which accounts for 70 percent of
China's energy consumption.
China already burns more than twice as much coal as the United
States, and almost as much as everybody else in the world combined. In the
race to keep up with soaring energy demand, it is building 550 new
coal-fired power stations (they are currently opening at the rate of two a
week), and nobody has the time to experiment with clean-burning coal
technologies that are still new even in the West. So China's emissions will
continue to race ahead of everybody else's.
How can they let this happen? Don't they understand that emissions
growing at this pace will pitch the world into runaway climate change, and
that they will among the worst sufferers if that happens? Well, yes and no.
The Chinese public mostly does not understand where this is leading,
because there has been little discussion of climate change in their media,
but also because their attention is focussed closer to home.
"China's position today is similar to that of the US or Europe
during the 70s, when people first started to be concerned about pollution
and the destruction of ecosystems," explained climate change expert Zou Ji
of Renmin University in Beijing. "We have only just started being concerned
about local environmental issues. When we become richer and richer...people
will have more time and more resources to pay attention to something not
directly linked to themselves."
But climate change WILL affect the lives of ordinary Chinese
people, and the government and the experts know it. One government study
last year predicted a 37 percent fall in crop yields within the next fifty
years if current trends persist. Since we may assume that climate change
will be having comparable effects elsewhere and that even a rich China will
be unable to make up the shortfall by importing food, that prediction
implies mass starvation. Don't they care?
Of course they care, but they are in a high-stakes poker game and
they cannot afford to blink. There is going to have to be a global
agreement on curbing greenhouse gas emissions within the next five to ten
years or the world faces runaway climate change, but countries like China
and India must get special terms or their hopes of a prosperous future are
doomed.
Put yourself in China's shoes. Five hundred years ago average
incomes in Europe, India and China were about the same. Then the Europeans
got the jump on everybody else technologically, grew unimaginably rich and
powerful, and conquered practically the whole world. They also
industrialised, and for two hundred years it was their industries, their
cities, their vehicles that poured excess CO2 and other greenhouse gases
into the atmosphere.
Now the rich countries are concerned about the consequences. Now
they are even willing to curb their emissions (though some rich countries
less so than others) -- but they can easily afford to, because they are
already rich and bound to remain so.
Whereas if China imposes the same kind of curbs on its emissions,
then it will not become a country where most people are prosperous and
secure in this generation, or perhaps ever. The same goes for India and all
the other once-poor countries that are now experiencing very rapid economic
growth. So the deal must be that they get to keep on growing fast, and the
rich countries take the strain.
There are two main ways for the developed countries to take the
strain. One is to cut their own emissions very deeply, leaving some room
for the developing countries to expand theirs. The other way is to pay
directly for cuts in the emissions of the developing countries: pay them to
adopt clean-burning coal technologies, pay them to build renewable energy
sources, pay them not to cut the rain-forests down. Pay them quite a lot,
in fact, because otherwise we all suffer.
The developing countries will never get that deal unless they
demonstrate that they are unwilling to curb their emissions without it.
That is what they are doing at the moment, and it's not actually a poker
game at all. It is a game of chicken.
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