So, who's going to blink? Neither China or the U.S. are prepared to cut GHG emissions if it means even slowing down the economy. Yet they're running neck and neck for the title of world's top carbon emitter. What's a planet to do?
With global warming high on the agenda for the world’s industrial powers gathering later this week in Germany, China staked out its position on Monday by releasing its first national strategy on climate change, a plan that promises to improve energy efficiency but rejects any mandatory caps on greenhouse gas emissions.
The 62-page plan, two years in the making, served at least partly as a rebuff to separate efforts by President Bush and European nations to draw China and other developing countries into a commitment to reduce emissions, which was expected to be a focal point at the expanded summit meeting of the Group of 8 industrialized nations.
China has resisted mandatory reductions in emissions, arguing that it is still a developing country and needs to balance environmental improvements with maintaining economic growth.
President Bush, trying to blunt criticism of his own record on global warming, proposed last Thursday a new negotiating framework in which the 15 countries that produce the most greenhouse gas emissions would meet this fall in Washington. Each country would establish its own targets and plan to slow emissions in the next 10 or 20 years, while the group would work to set a long-term global goal for substantially cutting emissions.
But some experts say the Bush administration’s approach is compromised because, like China, the United States opposes a mandatory cap on its emissions.
“China is not going to act in any sort of mandatory-control way until the United States does first,” said Joseph Kruger, policy director for the National Commission on Energy Policy, a bipartisan group in Washington.
Along with India and other large developing countries, China has long maintained that the established industrial powers need to act first because they built their wealth largely by burning fossil fuels and adding to the atmosphere’s blanket of greenhouse gases.
“Our general stance is that China will not commit to any quantified emissions reduction targets, but that does not mean we will not assume responsibilities in responding to climate change,” said Ma Kai, head of China’s powerful economic planning agency, the National Development and Reform Commission.
The report unveiled by Mr. Ma emphasizes trying to control greenhouse gas emissions by improving energy efficiency by 20 percent by 2010. But, in broad terms, the plan merely restates Beijing’s position that mandatory emissions caps are unfair to China and other developing countries still trying to modernize and improve living standards.
China, with the world’s fastest-growing major economy, had been projected to surpass the United States by 2009 or 2010 as the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, particularly carbon dioxide, which scientists say cause global warming. But China’s coal-based, high-polluting economy is growing so rapidly that the chief economist for the International Energy Agency is now predicting the country could become the global emissions leader as soon as this year.
Fatih Birol, the agency’s chief economist, warned that China must begin curbing its current rate of emissions. If not, he predicted that within 25 years China’s output of carbon dioxide emissions could amount to twice the combined emissions of the world’s richest nations — including the United States, members of the European Union and Japan.
At his news conference on Monday, Mr. Ma applauded Mr. Bush’s proposal but emphasized that any effort in Washington should complement, not replace, the existing framework, including the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, sponsored by the United Nations. Under the Kyoto Protocol, participating industrialized nations are subjected to caps on carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, while developing countries, including China and India, are exempt. ...
Mr. Birol, the I.E.A. economist, agreed that the developed world was responsible for the bulk of emissions and should play a leading role in finding a solution. But he said that no plan could succeed without a major role for China and that making distinctions between “total emissions” and “per capita emissions” obscured the larger point.
“The atmosphere does not make a distinction if it is cumulative or a per capita emission,” Mr. Birol said in a telephone interview. “Either way, it is a problem for all of us.”