It was Tuesday evening in the United States when President Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping announced their nations had come to a historic agreement on climate change that supposedly represented a “breakthrough.” The United States pledged to reduce its carbon emissions to 25 percent below 2005 levels by 2025. The Chinese pledged that they would stop their own emissions from increasing after they peak in 2030.
Obama’s backers crowed, finally having gotten some good news this month. It was a huge development, right?
Well, not really. In November 2012, the Guardian reported as disappointing news that analysts had reached “a consensus that barring any significant changes in policy, China’s emissions will rise until around 2030 — when the country’s urbanization peaks, and its population growth slows — and then begins to fall.” In other words, China did not agree to anything in this “deal” that wasn’t already expected to happen on its own.
As for the U.S. side of the deal, it is slightly more ambitious but completely nonbinding. Congress is obviously not going to go along with mandatory carbon curbs. On both sides, the climate cynicism is obvious.
Even so, U.S. compliance with this deal could come about purely by accident. As of 2013, Americans were already emitting about 10 percent less carbon than they had been in 2005, thanks entirely to a slow economy, high gasoline prices (at that time), low natural gas prices, and the continuation of a decades-old trend toward less energy-intensive economic production.
Baseline projections from the Energy Information Administration suggest that the United States hit peak carbon emissions last decade. Emissions are expected to remain roughly where they are now (5.5 to 5.6 billion metric tons per year) through 2040, without any significant increases in green energy and even though the U.S. population will be about 30 percent larger and the economy twice as large. All it would take is an unexpected technological nudge or two for the United States to honor Obama’s agreement without any effort whatsoever.
Or maybe that won’t happen — in which case no one will care, because there will be a new president. And the issue of climate change will likely remain just as boring to voters in 2025 as it was in 2014.
Republicans, newly empowered by the voters, face an important challenge. They must take the reins and make it clear they set the agenda from now on. They can keep Obama under pressure by sending him a litany of popular reforms that he will be reluctant either to sign or to veto. But the harder part will be to conduct vigorous oversight of the executive branch and make sure that Obama cannot seize the agenda back through executive actions — and that includes informal international agreements — that exceed his authority.
So no, this agreement with China is not necessarily a big deal. But it is an important data point for understanding Obama’s ambitions in next year’s Paris climate talks, and in his last two years in office generally. Obama has reached the stage of his presidency where regrets tend to set in and legacy-building becomes an obsession. This won’t always manifest itself in ways as harmless as this fake climate deal.
