A tale of two polluters

It is always dangerous to review the opera before the fat lady sings. We are in the final stage of rehearsals for COP15 – the 15th conference of the parties to the Kyoto Protocol – and the diva is backstage, warming up with a few scales. Sometimes she still seems up to a full-throated aria, but mostly she sounds tired and off-key. Critics are quietly preparing to bury her come December.

If COP15 ends without an agreement on a post-Kyoto framework, recriminations will fall along a crude and familiar axis of developed world, led by the US, versus developing world, led by China. As the world’s biggest emitters of greenhouse gases, these two nations will be blamed for failing to overcome both geo-strategic rivalry and domestic pressures to reach for the much bigger prize of climate security.

Polar opposites

The US and China are polar opposites in the climate change story: America, the world’s richest and biggest per capita polluter, has a heavy historic responsibility for current atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases; China, still relatively poor, has negligible historic responsibility but the burden of coming emissions that threaten humanity’s future.

Under the Kyoto Protocol, which the US negotiated in 1997 but did not join, America should cut emissions drastically and offer material and technical support to help China on to a low carbon development path. In the first commitment period, signatories rehearsed their Kyoto promises and though much was accomplished, many failed to meet their targets. None has so far delivered sufficiently on support for developing countries.  

Much has changed since then. China now represents a future challenge to US dominance, and Chinese and Indian emissions are now too large to continue unabated, as Kyoto permitted. In an argument about money, numbers and timetables, China reproaches the US for past and present failures while the US continues to make control of China’s future emissions a condition of a deal. For China that is a cipher for controlling other things.

If political reputations rest on accepting commitments commensurate with responsibilities, China’s case is the more convincing. In the context of the climate negotiations, Beijing sometimes resembles a hulking adolescent who is still trying to sit in his junior school desk and cling to the privileges of childhood. Nevertheless, China has the political advantage of having fulfilled its commitments and behaved as a responsible global player.

China refuses mandatory emissions caps, but does not refuse mitigation and has begun to map out a progressively reduced carbon route. President Hu Jintao’s promise in September of significant reductions in carbon intensity was by necessity a commitment to build mechanisms for measuring, reporting and controlling emissions, currently weak-to-absent in China. If carbon intensity targets were to be written into the next five-year plan, they would take on a new political force, though delivery is never guaranteed.

The US, on the other hand, has put one of the weakest offers on the table: mitigation to 2020 that is approximately one-tenth the scale of the EU’s effort, on a 1990 baseline – 3% to the EU’s 30%. The bulk of the US mitigation promise is pushed back to 2050, when current leaders will be long gone. Further, US negotiators oppose the extension and enlargement of the Kyoto Protocol, which many believe is essential to stabilize the carbon market and build on the frameworks currently in place.

Not far enough?

The open issue remains how much China is prepared to commit to in the near future and how to ensure that it is enough, either for the planet or for the US. Beijing’s future mitigation targets remain unquantified and it is not possible to weigh the overall contribution to global goals.

One worrying sign is a reluctance to embrace plans to limit the rise in global average temperatures to 2 degrees Celsius. Why is Beijing so coy on this issue? A scientist close to the government said recently that "further work" was required. Other insiders have said that they do not believe the target can be met, so are reluctant to endorse it.

How much more might China do? Nothing, unless the developed world delivers on past pledges and the US stops free-riding on the global effort. President Obama is due to visit China in November. The world will be watching.