The Climate for U.S.-China Cooperation

By William Chandler

Earth’s future depends on the United States and China acting to curb greenhouse gas emissions. These two countries together account for over 40 percent of global emissions. Yet, both countries remain reluctant to commit to binding climate action, and attempts to find agreement between them veer between useful cooperation on clean energy technology and finger pointing in global climate talks.

Differences in stages of economic development cause diverging points of view. American policymakers foresee rapid Chinese growth engulfing any U.S. emissions reductions. This perspective hardened recently when China surpassed the United States to become the world’s largest source of greenhouse gases, releasing over 7 billion tons of carbon dioxide per year. With Chinese coal-fired power generation surging 10 percent last year and car sales exceeding 16 million, the scale and speed of China’s energy development increasingly influences U.S. climate politics.

Chinese policymakers in turn argue that cutting Chinese emissions would restrict energy for basic needs and unfairly limit Chinese development. They point out that American per capita carbon dioxide emissions remain five times higher than Chinese emissions, and that since the industrial revolution the United States has released over a trillion tons of carbon dioxide from fossil fuel combustion, four times that of China. Chinese experts insist that China remains a developing country, with hundreds of millions of people aspiring to leave behind hardscrabble lives.

Equity requires acknowledging that rich countries caused most of the climate problem and should take immediate steps to address the problem. Climate science suggests that avoiding catastrophic climate change will also require all countries to do all they can to reduce emissions. Stabilizing the climate requires cutting greenhouse gas emissions all the way to zero in this century. Dealing with this reality requires at a minimum that China and the United States move forward urgently on emissions mitigation.

Off the Tracks

Chinese leaders spent several years preparing for the 2009 Copenhagen climate summit. They realized they had to reduce their emissions footprint. Chinese economic growth and trade surpluses, reflecting the accelerating shift of manufacturing to China, made China vulnerable to the charge that it was enticing developed nations’ industry with weak pollution control policies. Moreover, the Chinese scientific community shared the international consensus that the threat of climate change was real, change was already underway, and that the resulting sea level rise and drought and increase in severe storms would directly harm the Chinese people. China’s president Hu Jintao and premier Wen Jiaobao recognized that it was in China’s best interest to be proactive at the Copenhagen summit.

China’s leaders thus went to Copenhagen with a significant—if short-term—commitment to curb emissions growth. They pledged to cut the amount of greenhouse gas produced per unit of economic output by 40-45 percent by 2020, thinking that their offer would insulate them from criticism as climate “free riders,” and might even be warmly welcomed. China was, after all, acknowledging the threat of climate change for the first time and offering to do something about it. That the target would permit growth in Chinese carbon emissions until 2020 disappointed activists who wanted more aggressive global action. But, in fairness, no country has ever achieved for so long a period the high rate of reduction in emissions intensity offered by the Chinese negotiators. Achieving the target would, according to emissions scenarios published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, maintain the chance of holding warming to less than two degrees Celsius. China’s offer was consistent with the notion that developing country emissions could increase in the near term as long as they were slowed as much as possible and then cut thereafter, perhaps beginning as soon as 2025.

The United States went to Copenhagen with a seemingly weak hand. President Obama had pledged to cut U.S. emissions by 17 percent from the 2005 level by the year 2020. But the Congress, controlled by his own party, had failed to enact legislation to ensure that the U.S. Copenhagen commitment could be met. Nevertheless, the President and his negotiating team convinced much of the world community that the United States, which had dramatically failed to meet the commitment it made during the negotiations resulting in the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, this time was serious.

U.S. climate negotiators, meanwhile, objected to the Chinese Copenhagen commitment because it would not, under the Framework Convention, be “binding.” It is easy to underestimate—and sometimes hard to grasp—the symbolic importance of this issue. Negotiators, after all, acknowledge that the Kyoto Protocol, though supposedly binding, has no meaningful penalty for non-compliance and that no one is proposing enforceable penalties for non-compliance in any successor agreement. Whether the agreements then are “legally binding” seems somewhat arcane. To the practical-minded, a better approach would be for countries to make serious commitments to curb emissions and commit to enforce them domestically. Real action would trump a symbolic, unenforceable agreement.

A related disagreement involved the transparency and credibility of progress toward mitigation goals once they were set. Many international observers are skeptical that Chinese monitoring, reporting, and verification methods for emissions mitigation efforts can be made more credible. While this skepticism is inherent in international relations, it is made worse by known inconsistencies in the Chinese data system. For example, China in 2005 set a goal of cutting energy used per unit of economic output by 20 percent before the end of 2010. The official estimate of progress toward the goal in 2009 was revised upward from about 9 to more than 14 percent. Though the higher level of progress is considered plausible by experts, it is very hard for outsiders to evaluate its validity.

By the close of the Copenhagen climate summit, Chinese negotiators were denounced by the Western press for having intentionally wrecked the negotiations. They were then derided in Chinese circles for having capitulated to President Obama by signing onto the Copenhagen Accord. High-level negotiators for both countries left Denmark with hard feelings and the sense that U.S.-China climate cooperation had nearly gone off the rails. There was real danger that if this key relationship were damaged, the world would lose a decade in fighting climate change.

The U.S.-China climate relationship remains tenuous. American policymakers express frustration that China regards the Copenhagen Accord as merely political in nature and not the basis for on-going negotiations toward a binding agreement. Similarly, it is difficult for some to understand American intentions for emissions mitigation given Congress’ failure to pass climate legislation.

One positive note is the willingness of American and Chinese officials to use off-the-record “Track II” dialogues to get beyond past misunderstandings. One on-going effort (sponsored by the blue moon fund and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund) began even before the election of President Barack Obama. Such efforts helped officials get beyond the seemingly endless routine of “You first!” “No, after you!” on climate action, and they made it easier for officials to agree on clean energy cooperation and to prepare for Copenhagen. After the near train wreck of Copenhagen, a group of Chinese and Americans revived this Track II climate dialogue in an effort to overcome fundamental misunderstandings and maintain momentum in climate cooperation. The combined efforts of groups involved in this and many other efforts are contributing both to better American understanding of what China is doing in mitigation and better Chinese understanding of why verification is important to policymakers.

Next Steps

The climate challenge staggers the imagination both technically and institutionally. In the not-so-distant future, developed countries must begin deep cuts in their emissions while China and other developing countries must slow growth in, cap, and eventually begin to cut their own greenhouse gas emissions. A global climate policy, if it is to work, must eventually be truly binding and include enforcement mechanisms for all countries. Incremental steps, though short of perfection, will help persuade governments and their citizens that the costs of climate action are manageable and worthwhile. Several steps can be taken to increase confidence and trust both officially and outside official channels. The most promising of these include:

• Increasing the transparency and credibility of China’s energy intensity reduction policies, and clarifying how the United States will meet its Copenhagen target.
• Identifying opportunities jointly to provide emissions mitigation assistance to developing countries, including human capacity building at the sub-national level.
• Boosting joint energy research and development efforts.
• Removing artificial barriers to the flow of financing to clean energy projects.

Strikingly, given the urgency of climate action, resources have been meager for energy science and technology cooperation between China and the United States. But increasingly, officials and NGO leaders are exploring the possibilities for science and technology cooperation in three priority areas: deployment of best practice technologies, innovation in new technologies, and agreements to prevent either country from gaining an unfair advantage.

Research collaboration would enable the United States and China to build on each other’s strengths. For example, American laboratories rank among the world’s most innovative. But to remain competitive, technology companies must have access to the marketplace. Feedback from factories and projects to the laboratory is known to be essential for innovation. And because China is far outpacing the rest of the world in economic growth, research and development must be directly connected to the Chinese market. Innovation everywhere is dependent upon investors being able to capture the benefits of the innovations they sponsor. Both Chinese and American innovators would benefit from a stronger system for ensuring that the benefits of research are shared fairly among participants.

More urgently, deployment of existing carbon emissions reduction technologies requires breaking down market barriers. Business leaders could help by working with both governments to accelerate the adoption of existing mitigation measures. Joint policy initiatives to provide tax breaks for investment and impose tax penalties on high-carbon energy would reduce the risk that either country would take advantage of goals and measures set by the other. One helpful effort matches innovative states to Chinese provincial governments, which are unprepared and under-resourced for implementing China’s Copenhagen commitment.¹

Experiments in bilateral cooperation could benefit other countries as well. China and the United States could develop packages of policies and measures, test them for efficacy, correct them, and share them—particularly with other rapidly developing nations, such as India.

This set of activities comprises an effort in which Chinese and Americans at all levels—in and outside the two governments—can participate.

¹The Global Environmental Institute and Center for Climate Strategies recently organized a foundation-funded study tour to introduce Chinese provincial climate policy leaders to their counterparts in New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Washington, D.C.

2009 Annual Review

This feature is from the 2009 Annual Review, which also includes two videos (Rockefeller Family in China: Then and Now and Rockefeller Brothers Fund: Grantees Work on Environmental Disclosure) about the Southern China program.