For decades climate change protesters have had an easy target: the gas-guzzling Americans who emit more carbon dioxide per capita -- and more as a civilization -- than anybody else. If only the US would change its ways, all would be well.
It is true that the US' attitude and behavior are global problems; but it is also true that it is a democracy exposed to argument and evidence, shifts in public opinion and international pressure -- and that it may be moving its position. No such claim can be made of China. And here is the brutal reality. From now on it is China and not the US that will be the number one threat to the planet. Privately, energy experts and international climate officials know that within 40 years the Chinese will have melted the Himalayan ice cap -- with incalculable consequences for themselves and the world. And that is only the beginning.
This, of course, is not being acknowledged at Bali, where some 20,000 delegates and activists have been discussing how to achieve the vital international climate-change agreement to succeed Kyoto when it expires in 2012. Nor is it top of the agenda in international conventions that discuss global warming and climate change.
It is the capitalist West and the US in particular that are defined as the problem; it is they who have caused global warming; and it is they who must put it right by dramatically cutting their carbon emissions while paying for improvements in the rest of the world.
Developing countries, varying from "managed democracies" to straightforward one-party states, must be able to grow as they like, with no questions asked about their political systems. But it is those same systems whose lack of accountability, transparency and means for public protest are directly responsible for gross environmental depredation.
It is a consensus that needs to be challenged. As the World Energy Outlook's projections imply, even if the rest of the world limits carbon dioxide emissions to current levels for the rest of the century, China's growth alone will ensure that world temperatures rise by up to 6?C by 2100. Put another way, China is burning so much dirty coal, so inefficiently, that by 2030 its carbon dioxide emissions per head will equal Europe's -- and it will have emitted more into the atmosphere in 25 years than Europe and the US have done in the past 100 years.
understated
Worse, these alarming numbers are deliberately understated by the Chinese government. China consistently underestimates its coal production because it neglects to count the coal mined in its myriad small mines. It also disguises how much dirty, low-quality coal is burned in its coal-fired power stations. My information is that while officially this year its carbon dioxide emissions will approach 6.4 gigatonnes -- exceeding the US's 6.2 gigatonnes -- the real figure is some 7.5 gigatonnes.
The next concern is that China will only sign off international estimates of the growth of its carbon dioxide emissions over the next 25 years on three key assumptions. First, that the understated emission figure is used as the baseline; second, that it will achieve its commitment to improve energy efficiency by 20 percent by 2010; and third, that after the next 10 years its growth will subside significantly and its energy efficiency will continue to improve. Thus by 2030 we are asked to believe in the World Energy Outlook's central case that China's carbon dioxide emissions will be 8.9 gigatonnes.
Even on this estimate, the lion's share of all the growth in world carbon dioxide emissions will come from China, with India and the US ranking second and third. But we know that there is no chance of China meeting its energy efficiency targets by 2010 because it has already missed them. We also know, because the World Energy Outlook tells us in a second high-growth scenario, that if China's growth were only to slow down marginally over the next 10 years, by 2030 it would be emitting 11.4 gigatonnes. So the real output in 2030, based on probable growth, coal use and efficiency, will be close to 15 gigatonnes -- twice the likely figure of the already high US.
I put these numbers to professor Nick Stern, the economist who masterminded the so-called Stern Report on climate change. He agrees that China's numbers are probably understated. That only intensifies the urgency of proceeding faster with the technologies that will enable carbon that enters the atmosphere, particularly from coal-fired stations, to "be capped and stored." He would like to see 30 commercial "carbon-capture and storage" power stations be built within the next seven years as a matter of international priority and for the West to accept that it will have to contribute to the high cost of installing this new technology in developing countries, including China, through a substantial expansion of an international carbon emissions trading scheme. Fatih Birol, chief economist of the International Energy Agency who directs the World Energy Outlook, draws attention to the already alarming figures on China in his groundbreaking report.
overhaul
Both are right -- but while the West must engage, so must China. It cannot continue to grow while emitting so much carbon dioxide. When the Himalayan ice cap has disappeared, which it is already beginning to do, its capacity to regulate ground water from rain will cease; China's rivers will alternate between flood and drought. The West's technology and cash are the necessary but insufficient triggers to change. To complete the task China must radically overhaul its own political and institutional system.
Environmental effectiveness requires accountability. China may have 1,000 environment protests a week; but it ignores them. Distinguished activists who overstep the mark are arrested -- like Wu Lihong (
China must develop and continue its remarkable onslaught on poverty. But China's development cannot mean an uninhabitable planet. The truth must be confronted. Liberal campaigners against climate change need to accept that democracy -- and Western capitalism -- have a better chance of saving us than the Chinese Communist Party.
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