China to Hold Firm on Climate Change Policy Position

(This article is contributed by our guest writer, Julian Wong, and was first published in The Green Leap Forward.)

China releases comprehensive white paper on its climate change policy ahead of key international meetings.

Ahead of the high level technology transfer summit in Beijing next week; next December’s 14th Conference of Parties under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Poznan, Poland, during which a general framework for a successor treaty to the Kyoto Protocol, which expires at the end of 2012, will be hashed out; and of course, Halloween, the State Council of the central government has released a white paper on climate change policy titled “Comprehensive Plan on Climate Change.” This white paper also comes on the heels of China’s submission of a viewpoint paper to the Ad Hoc Working Group on Long-term Cooperative Action of the UNFCCC on September 28.

While the 11,000 word white paper reads like a kitchen-sink of domestic policies that may seem to ring hollow given the institutional limitations that China observers have come to be so familiar with, the document does provide a good summary of the specific policy programs that China has enacted so far and of future policies that we can expect. Above everything else, the timing of the release of this document is highly strategic, ahead of the above mentioned meetings, as the white paper also states in no uncertain terms various policy positions that seem to have the north and the south heading towards climate deadlock.

China’s position is clear. It wants developed countries to take the lead in curbing emissions and aiding developing countries to meet their low carbon aspirations by providing funding and technology. Let’s tease apart some of the verbiage that leads to this conclusion:

1. “Developed countries should be responsible for their accumulative emissions and current high per-capita emissions, and take the lead in reducing emissions, in addition to providing financial support and transferring technologies to developing countries.”

China is unswerving in the principle of “common but differentiated responsibilities.” It is simply not going to move before developed countries move (take note, Obama…and yes we are calling an election winner early here), and even if developed countries move, “China will move according to its own pace” related Professor Qi Ye of Tsinghua’s School of Public Policy & Management at a roundtable discussion on international low carbon collaboration in May.

2. “The UNFCCC and the Tokyo [sic] Protocol are the main programs for addressing climate change. Their status as the kernel mechanism and leading programs should be unswervingly upheld, and other types of bilateral and multilateral cooperation should be supplementary.”

This position shuts the door on a proposal, first espoused by Richard Stewart and my professor in law school, Jonathan Wiener for the U.S. and China (and other major developing country emitters) to, at least initially, engage with each in a separate legal regime from the UNFCCC process as a way to resolve the climate deadlock, and with a long term view of eventually merging these alternative regimes into the UNFCCC regime. The message between the lines seems to be that China, in short, will not be sucker-punched into binding caps on emissions through some backdooor mechanism.

3. “China actively impels and participates in technology transfer under the UNFCCC framework, works hard to build a favorable domestic environment for international technology transfer, and has submitted a technological demand list.”

It has been clear since COP 13 in Bali last December that China will play the technology transfer card (backed by the common but differentiated responsibilities hand) as a decoy to binding itself to emissions caps. China is pushing the establishment of an international technhology transfer fund funded by, of course, the developed countries.

Both #1 and #3 are points that are elaborated on in the views paper submitted on Sept 28, and have been a consistent refrain by Chinese negotiators for at least a year now. As highlighted by CELB, the viewpoints paper casts its own interpretation on the “common but differentiated reposibitlities” principle when it says:

Any further sub-categorization of developing countries runs against the Convention itself and is not in conformity with the consensus reached in the Bali Action Plan.

This (together with a pronouncement in the same document against singling out certain of China’s industrial sectors for sectoral caps) again shuts another possible backdoor strategy by UNFCCC parties to attempt to classify and treat China as a special case, and put in place some China-specific clauses into the successor treaty to the Kyoto Protocol. In other words, China will not be singled out as more culpable for the climate crisis with respect to other developing countries.

The Other Side of the Coin

While the moral position of China that developed countries should act first and aid developing countries financially and technologically is hard to argue against, such a moral high ground rests on shakier ground when one considers the projection that China’s per capita emissions will be double that of Europe’s by 2020 if China continues at an 8% emissions growth rate while EU continues towards a 20% reduction from 2007 levels (see text to footnote 1 of the recent report by the Climate Group). It is in China’s interest to curb greenhouse gas emissions, and not just improve emissions intensity. The business opportunities that a transition to a low carbon economy affords is also another reason to act, as Tsinghua University’s Hu Angang argues here, here and here.

Equally, it is worth questioning the assumption that technology transfer is a process that necessarily flows from the developed countries to the developing. Such an assumption, reasons Dr. David Tyfield of Lancaster University in the UK, rests the narrow association of “technology” with “high cost/hi tech” innovation, while ignoring other forms of low carbon innovation. In a private presentation hosted by the Beijing Energy Network and The Green Leap Forward on October 29 in Beijing, Dr Tyfield explained:

Once we recognize there there is low tech innovation that can happen, so called disruptive innovation, which is either low or low tech or social, and that has a capacity to peculate through the system and have profound change, then if there is there is a mechanism to stimulate international collaboration in these forms, and there is certainly need for collaboration in these forms, then there is all kinds of possibilities for mutal, win-win…High tech innovation is just moribund with the high cost of IP

If we just focus just on high technology, then we are also putting it as the “haves” against the “have nots”, i.e. the West versus China. The situation doesn’ t have to be like that, is not like that and should not be viewed like that. There is plenty of important low carbon innovation in China, which means that China in many ways can take the lead in certainly make a significant global contribution.

The most obvious example here is in the low cost innovation in renewables and the potential for the massive roll out of renewables across the world, whether it is in solar power–China now has five of the largest solar companies in the world–and similar for wind power…

[An example of low-tech innovation] is about the reduction in the use of nitrogen fertilizer by farmers. There are various forms of innovation involved in this project. There is the simple transformation of the use of fertilizer by farmers. There is the innovation of giving them a very low tech meter, just a stick basically, a very meter like a thermometer which you stick in the soil and tells you if there’s enough nitrogen in the soil in which case there’s no point in adding anymore or you’re just throwing your money away. If this were to spread across over all of China, where there is widespread over-use of nitrogen, releasing NOx gases which are themselves greenhouse gases and more potent than CO2 and of course polluting water, this would have a profound impact on China’s carbon footprint, and it is a very low tech innovation indeed.

So there appears to be a significant role to play for China in low carbon innovation. The Climate Group, with their report on China’s Clean Revolution, would agree. Uncannily, this last example by Dr. Tyfield was specifically described in the white paper which was released the same day as Dr. Tyfield’s presentation. [According to the white paper: "China has witnessed great progress in the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions in agriculture and the countryside in recent years. In 1,200 counties across the country, fertilizers are applied according to the results of tests of local soil. Guidance is given to farmers for the scientific application of fertilizers and to reduce the emission of nitrous oxide."] A transcript of Dr. Tyfield’s presentation will be posted next week on this blog (here and here). Watch out for a flurry of climate change policy developments over the final months of this year as these international meetings unfold.

If a more collaborative alternative to the current model of uni-directional technology transfer can be constructed in view of Dr. Tyfield’s optimism of China’s low-cost, low-tech innovation capacity, then perhaps a climate deadlock is not inevitable.

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