Gwynne Dyer: U.S. and China reach small breakthrough on climate change

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      When news got out that U.S. President Barack Obama and China’s President Xi Jinping had reached an agreement on climate change, the American blogosphere lit up with negative comments.

      “The problem is, Obama probably means it,” wrote Jazz Shaw of the major conservative political blog Hot Air, “while China is almost certainly just yanking the world's collective chain yet again with a bit of lip service as they seek better trade arrangements.”

      But Jazz Shaw has got it exactly backwards. It’s the United States that cannot be trusted to keep its commitments, because the American political system is mired in a perpetual civil war and at the moment it is the climate-change deniers who have the upper hand.

      Whereas the Chinese will probably keep their word, because there are no denialists in China and the government is genuinely terrified of climate change.

      The Obama-Xi deal is not wonderful, but it is the first step in the right direction that the world’s two biggest emitters of carbon dioxide have taken together. Obama promised that the U.S. will reduce its greenhouse gas emissions to at least 26 percent below the 2005 level by 2025. Xi promised more vaguely that China’s emission would peak by 2030 or earlier (and, by implication, then start to decline).

      That looks a bit lopsided, of course, but any deal that takes account of current realities is bound to look like that. China is still a poor country, and it is racing to grow its economy fast enough to preserve political stability. That means it has to generate a lot more energy fast.

      China is installing a great deal of clean power (around half the world’s new solar energy plants last year, for example), but just to keep the lights on it has to go on building lots of fossil-fuel plants as well—and most of them burn the dirtiest fuel, coal. Official policy is driving the number of new coal-fired plants down, however, which is one reason why Xi thinks he can keep his promise that emissions will stop growing by 2030.

      Obama, by contrast, presides over an economy that is already very rich. The average American citizen still consumes twice as much energy as the average Chinese, but total U.S. energy consumption stopped rising years ago. Making 26 percent cuts in American energy use over the next 10 years is not a huge challenge; it only requires a reduction of about 2.6 percent a year.

      So the American and Chinese commitments in the new deal, while asymmetrical, are not unequal in terms of the political and economic burdens they impose. The real difference lies in the likelihood that the two sides will stick to the deal over the next 10 to 15 years as they have promised. China probably will. The United States probably won’t.

      The Chinese regime knows what global warming will do to the country if it is not contained. A study commissioned by the World Bank about a decade ago, but never published (quite likely at China’s insistence), concluded that if average global temperature rises by two degrees C, China will lose about 38 percent of its food production.

      As in all predictions of this sort, that number may be wrong by five or even ten percentage points, but that doesn’t really matter. Even a 28 percent loss of food production would mean semi-permanent famine in China. The regime would not survive that, and much of the growth that has been achieved by great sacrifice in the past three decades would be lost.

      Beijing takes climate change very seriously. Even though the regime must also keep the economic growth going if it wishes to survive, it knows that it must start making real concessions on emissions in order to facilitate a global deal.

      Xi did not set this target of capping Chinese emissions by 2030 without a great deal of discussion and debate within the regime. Having made the promise, he will keep it. So will his successors, at least so long as the Communist Party goes on ruling China. Whereas Obama will be gone in two years, and cannot bind his successors to keep his promise in any way.

      Indeed, even in the past six years he has never got any legislation on climate change through the Republican-dominated House of Representatives. Instead, he had to resort to issuing executive orders through the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to make even modest improvements like raising the fuel efficiency of US-made cars.

      Now the House has voted to repeal the EPA's authority to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act, which would strip even that power from him. The new Republican majority in the Senate will probably do the same. Obama could veto such a law, but all the Republicans have to do is attach it to the budget and they would set up a confrontation that would shut the U.S. government down again.

      The Chinese know this, of course, but they are so desperate to get matters moving on the climate front that they are willing to take a chance that the deal will survive.

      Comments

      7 Comments

      P.Peto

      Nov 14, 2014 at 1:23pm

      I agree, Gwynne is spot on, China is serious about global warming and the U.S. and Canada are not. How often has the US kept it's promises, bargained in good faith and not been obstructionist on a whole range of vitally important world issues? Why should it when it claims to be the exception among nations and the indispensable leader of the world! That would mean "what's good for America is also necessarily good for the world". "We make the laws and you must obey our diktats". Besides, the US government is bought and paid for by the Fossil Fuel industries among other major corporate lobbies who share a common economic interest in keeping the status quo just as it is. My suspicions lead me to believe that the global warming trend will continue and we will even have a world war over the remaining fossil fuel resources which will mark the end of the "Anthropocene",a stage in the evolution of life history dominated by Humans. Life will continue to evolve, ecosystems will be significantly changed but the Earth's little experiment in evolving a purposefully self-destructive organism will have come to it's logical conclusion. I can live with that can you?

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      RUK

      Nov 14, 2014 at 3:48pm

      No, P Peto, that's why I am investing in Tesla so that ultimately Space X has the funding to put a colony on Mars to preserve what might be the only intelligence at our level in the universe. To hedge my bets, I put my money, my time and my votes towards efforts to conserve what we have got, where we have it.

      I can't live with throwing humanity away blithely, easy come easy go, no, thanks for asking. No, I'm not sanguine about the lights going out slowly, nor the quick option of vaporization on a radioactive billiard ball. I'm not content to wash my hands and say, oh poor me is powerless, we have to let the assholes in power kill us.

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      scissorpaws

      Nov 15, 2014 at 9:20am

      Hate to disagree, but I think the American public are moving toward a realization that climate change is real ahead of the politicos. Remember that Same Sex Marriage wasn't even on the radar as little as five years ago in the US and now it is rapidly becoming the law of the land. Marijuana will probably be legalized nationally sooner rather than later. Things move fast in the US these days. Less so in Canada, home of Greenpeace and Sea Shepherd, to our shame. I think Obama is hamstringing the Republicans for 2016 where a major ballot question is going to be Climate Change. The Polar Vortex and California Desert, rising waters in Florida, are going to raise it to the top of the election. All's he needs is another super-hurricane to seal the deal. Obama's playing his cards well, as usual. I think the first black president is the best we've seen since Kennedy. A pity he couldn't have four more years.

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      I Chandler

      Nov 15, 2014 at 3:06pm

      DYER: "Xi promised more vaguely that China’s emission would peak by 2030 or earlier ...That looks a bit lopsided, of course"

      China also intends to increase the share of non-fossil fuels in primary energy consumption to around 20 percent by 2030 - According to the announcement:
      http://www.cctv-america.com/2014/11/12/us-china-bilateral-talks-covers-s...

      Xi also said: "the defense departments of the two countries have signed memorandums of understanding to establish mutual reporting mechanisms on major military operations and a code of safe conduct on naval and air military encounter between the two sides.

      The two militaries should deepen exchanges, mutual trust and cooperation based on the two memorandums of understanding, he said.

      China would like to make progress in the exchanges between senior officers, improve communications, and conduct more joint trainings and drills with the United States."

      China better have learned the Lessons of Libya:
      http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/11/12/the-lessons-of-libya/

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      Tom Black

      Nov 15, 2014 at 3:16pm

      China has given up nothing, 2030 was already the expected date that their emissions would level off.

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      Jack

      Nov 17, 2014 at 1:52pm

      Gwynne Dyer know exactly what the Chinese Communist Party thinks, right. The reality is that China and all developing countries couldn't care less about global warming, if they did they would stop exporting or importing fossil fuels, something they are clearly not doing. Only Western governments care about this issue, since environmentalism has become a kind of replacement Christianity in the secular society.

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