That’s the question I ask in an article published today on ChinaDialogue, a bilingual English / Chinese environment website.
I’ve already blogged here about a paper that I published a few weeks back, The Post-Kyoto Bidding War, which discussed the need for a global ceiling on CO2 concentrations and for developing country targets in a post-Kyoto regime. The paper noted, approvingly, the evolving German-Indian conversation about the need for a future climate deal to centre on convergence to equal per capita emission rights, and suggested that this could potentially pave the way for a more substantive discussion about stabilising the climate than the one we’ve had to date.
What the paper didn’t explore in detail is the fascinating situation of China – a nation whose CO2 emissions per capita are right on the cusp of the crucial tipping point of global average per capita emissions. I spoke recently to the International Energy Agency to ask them when they expected China’s per capita emissions to surpass the global average. Their answer: 2008. That date is of fundamental importance for all negotiators in Bali, as the ChinaDialogue article explains:
When this change takes place, it will represent a major watershed in international climate policy. China has until now been squarely in the same camp as the G77 bloc of developing countries, but its accession to the above average emitters’ club may introduce a much more nuanced picture.
Whereas for India, participation in a global deal based on per capita convergence makes sense for reasons of profitability alone, the same will from next year not hold true for China. As its per capita emissions overtake the global average, it will find itself in the same situation as both the US and the EU, in that any global deal that actually stabilises the climate will involve real terms emissions reductions – regardless of whether the process of convergence to equal per capita levels happens quickly, slowly or not at all.
In this sense, whether China should support a stabilisation ceiling – and the targets for developing countries that it would inevitably entail – depends entirely on how urgent China perceives climate change to be, and how badly it wants the world to agree a solution to the problem.
If China essentially concurs with the relaxed view about urgency of the United States, then there is no problem. But if, on the other hand, China thinks that climate-driven damages are likely to be sufficiently serious and detrimental to Chinese interests to warrant solving the problem sooner rather than later – by setting a stabilisation target, in other words – then that will necessitate the development of a Chinese view on how the resulting “global emissions budget” should be shared out. Few issues involved in China’s “peaceful rise” are likely to be as significant in their implications for the rest of the world as this one.
What it comes down to, in a nutshell, is this: if China does see climate change as urgent, and genuinely wants to solve it, then does it accept per capita convergence as the core principle for sharing out a global emissions budget? And if not, then how does it think such a budget should be divided between 192 countries?
