The Obama administration could learn a thing or two from its Chinese counterparts when it comes to tackling climate change, according to those tracking the communist nation’s environmental policy.
Although China’s plans to combat global warming are nothing shy of ambitious, the government is going about them in different ways than the United States.
For example, China didn’t set out to establish climate regulations from the start, as President Obama did under his Climate Action Plan. Instead, it focused on regional pilot projects to inform its plans for establishing a national regulation.
Some observers say China’s strategy shows it is concerned about its economy and doesn’t want its climate policy to be out of step with economic growth.
“Through striking a balance between economic development and population growth, sustainable development will be enhanced,” the country’s current five-year strategy reads.
Republicans argue it’s the opposite for the Obama administration. “In sum, the president’s climate plan amounts to all pain for American consumers and China’s gain,” Rep. Ed Whitfield of Kentucky said a year ago in a USA Today op-ed. “While President Obama continues to spend tens of billions of dollars and seek to hamstring our economy, China and other countries abroad are poised to take advantage of our competitive weakness.”
Whitfield expressed the feelings of most Republicans who view a joint climate agreement between the U.S. and China reached last year as toothless, letting the world’s top polluter off the hook while limiting America’s domestic energy output.
GOP lawmakers also argue that the greenhouse gas emissions that most climate scientists blame for global warming are historically low in the U.S. due to natural gas derived from hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. They say new U.S. regulations to curb greenhouse gas emissions would have little effect. Instead, the world’s top emitter — China — should do more.
Others say China’s plans demonstrate it is looking for a solution that is market-based, not centered on strict regulation. It is developing a cap-and-trade system with the help of the seven regional projects that it started in 2011. The program would cap emissions and then establish a credit system for compliance.
“It is generally seen as a market-based regulation, that prices the externality and leaves it to market forces to come up with the solution,” said Jules Kortenhorst, CEO of the nonpartisan Rocky Mountain Institute, which focuses on energy issues. He said a market-based solution, either a “carbon tax” or a cap-and-trade system, would be preferable to Obama’s plans.
Some conservatives, though they oppose cap-and-trade, have weighed using a carbon tax, which would put a price on carbon dioxide emissions, as a way to address emissions.
On the other hand, new Environmental Protection Agency rules, called the Clean Power Plan, place states on the hook to reduce emissions by playing up renewable energy over fossil fuels. “I think that everyone agrees that it is the ‘second-best’ solution,” Kortenhorst said in an email. “It came into being because the Congress was unable to reach agreement on a cap and trade (or for that matter carbon tax) bill in Obama’s first term.”
Kortenhorst is advising the Chinese government on economically feasible ways to reduce emissions for its next five-year plan to be issued next year. He says China is moving in the direction of others, including U.S. states in the Northeast and California that have adopted cap-and-trade programs.
Economic growth is key in the government’s strategic five-year plan. Nevertheless, the climate deal it reached with the U.S. makes 2030 the year when it reaches peak carbon emissions, achieving 20 percent of its energy from renewables.
The U.S. set a goal to cut emissions by up to 28 percent by 2025 under the joint agreement. China said its emissions would hit a peak by 2030. But critics say it would reach peak emissions by that year if it did nothing at all.
Derek Scissors, a scholar with the conservative American Enterprise Institute, says China’s emissions goals are being made because of its slowing economy.
“There was an unsustainable, stimulus-driven boost in economic activity, followed by the inevitable slide toward stagnation that is being ongoing since 2011,” said Scissors, who specializes in Asian issues. “With that slide, growth in Chinese energy use and emissions has vanished.”
Compared to the slide in the Chinese economy, which offers massive subsidies for wind and solar energy, “the cap and trade program is a footnote,” he said.
But the Environmental Defense Fund says the 2030 goal will “no doubt” pose challenges for China, which said it will cost $6.6 trillion to reach the goals it outlined in a plan it submitted to the United Nations in June ahead of a December conference to hash out an international climate deal. The head of the environmental group’s China office, Dan Dudek, said in a blog that “China will have to make some tough decisions to bend the curve on carbon.”
Dudek’s office is working with the government there on developing its carbon market.
A cap-and-trade market becomes even more crucial for the Chinese to meet their 2030 goal, Dudek says. He estimates that they will have to begin capping emissions in 2020 to achieve that target. He says there are the same concerns over costs that are apparent in the U.S., but that China is “bullish” on the direction it wants to go.
“Today, you see many of the same forces at stake in China as you do in the United States. People are worried about jobs, competitiveness and the cost of pollution controls; and some question whether the problem [of climate change] is real,” Dudek said.
“But the Chinese are bullish on their ability to tackle big challenges, given what’s been accomplished in modern China,” he said. “With this perspective, they also think that environmental problems can be solved.”
President Obama dispatched his lead counsel on climate change, Brian Deese, this month to discuss the issue with Indian and Chinese officials. The meeting came ahead of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s state visit to the White House later this month, where climate change will be a major item on the agenda.
This article appears in the Sept. 14 edition of the Washington Examiner magazine.
