China Talks Tough in Copenhagen

While the EU and the USA argue that China must do more to combat climate change, Beijing's chief negotiator, Su Wei, is keen to make China the principal lobbyist for developing nations in Copenhagen. He maintains that not China but the industrialized West is mainly to blame for climate change. He has criticised US targets, set at a 4 percent reduction compared to 1990 levels, and pointed out that US emission levels continue to rise although the country is fully industrialised. Beijing says that developing and developed countries must shoulder different responsibilities and has been arguing that emission levels in large developing countries like China must first rise in order to boost living standards. India amongst others shares this view.

A UN panel has said reductions of 25 to 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2020 are required to curb global warming. China criticises these figures, saying an EU cut of 20 percent would not be enough, and that 30 percent was still too easy by half. Beijing has also criticised the climate fund, saying that the ten billion US dollars allocated for developing countries from 2010 to 2012 is simply not enough.

China's progress

But after all the criticism, there has been some progress, claims the UN. Achim Steiner, Executive Director of the United Nations Environment Programme:

"Last week countries like China, India, Mexico, Brazil, Indonesia and South Africa set their own, individual goals. For Copenhagen that means that requirements have been outlined that will help us reach these goals that have been set by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). And China is by far not the bad guy here, but it is a country that will be able to make one of the largest contributions in the future towards a global climate policy."

According to China expert, Jennifer Turner, from the China Environment Forum in New York, China's current goal is based on the success China has seen from some very ambitious programmes. China has managed to reduce its energy intensity by 20 percent within the last five years. This has been achieved by pressuring 1,000 high energy intensity companies to become energy efficient, making a certain amount of renewable energy mandatory and using energy-saving light bulbs. But, Turner points out, though China has installed a lot of wind and solar power, around 30 per cent of their wind power is still not connected to the national grid.

Implementation might not be so easy, Turner explains: “Enforcement is often quite difficult for environmental policies in general in China, as I am sure you know, local governments are extremely powerful and the central government has often had difficulties in getting local governments to obey pollution emission standards because they don't really have any financial leverage over them. But over the past, particularly over the past five years, China has become much stricter and punishments have grown larger."

Copenhagen is the beginning of a long road

Turner says China has learned a lot from US non-governmental organisations such as the Energy Foundation, Natural Resource Defence Council and also from Greenpeace, who've really been working hard over the past decade in particular to help improve regulatory law in China. She says China's government really is changing, getting younger and more skilled.

China, say some experts, has come a long way since Kyoto, but in the end, Beijing will benefit most from international cooperation. As the world's factory, China is not going to peak in terms of their energy demand for quite a long time. That means that the Copenhagen conference is just the beginning of a long process. From the West's perspective, the main thing now is to keep China at the negotiating table.

Author:Sarah Berning
Editor: Grahame Lucas