China Shows It’s Getting Serious About Climate Change

TIME - Justin Worland

The best thing to come out of a summit between China and the U.S. is a renewed commitment to fight global warming

Chinese President Xi Jinping listens as President Barack Obama speaks during an official state arrival ceremony for the Chinese president at the White House in Washington on Sept. 25, 2015.

China—the world’s largest polluter—has sought to portray itself as a leader in the global fight against climate change in recent years. The country has expedited the development of renewable energy power plants, experimented with cap-and-trade programs and last year committed to curb its growing carbon dioxide emissions in coming decades.
But despite these initiatives many lawmakers in the United States and policy makers around the world have viewed China’s environmental programs with skepticism—more promise than performance. China’s landmark announcement Friday of a national cap-and-trade program and other policies to reduce carbon emissions should ameliorate some of those concerns, experts said, even while the country faces roadblocks to implementation.
Last year’s joint announcement from the U.S. and China set big goals on the part of both countries to eventually reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The U.S. promised to reduce carbon emissions by 26% to 28% below 2005 levels by 2025, and Chinese officials said the country’s carbon dioxide emissions would reach peak levels by 2030.
This week’s announcement, both from the U.S. and China, follows up on that target, providing a plan to reach it. A cap-and-trade program would set a national limit in China on carbon emissions in the heavy-polluting industries of power generation, iron and steel, chemicals, and building materials and require companies to buy credits to pollute. Another program will prioritize the use renewable energy on the grid. (Right now, while China produces a great deal of renewable energy, problems with the grid means much of it goes unused.) The country will also improve appliance and vehicle efficiency standards.
“It’s really walking the talk to the commitment last year,” said Alden Meyer, director of strategy and policy at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “China has really been working over the last year to put flesh on the bones.”
China benefits internationally from taking on climate change—especially at a time when the country is coming under pressure for alleged cyberespionage and territorial expansion—but experts say the most logical reason to trust the commitment China may be because of internal issues the country faces. Most of the country’s energy currently comes from coal. In the past, coal plants in China have been cheap and easy to build, but the fossil fuel source has led to crippling pollution and a dramatic public health problem. Air pollution in China causes 1.6 million premature deaths every year, or 4,400 per day, research has shown. At the same time, the country is the world’s largest importer of foreign oil, leaving it dependent on shifting oil prices and the messy geopolitics of the Middle East. Renewable energy provides the logical alternative, experts say.
“Their cities are choking, to put it bluntly,” said John Creyts, managing director at the Rocky Mountain Institute, an energy think tank. “They need a development pathway that allows them to grow without choking their people and requiring them to be depend on external economies for the resources they need.”
In fact, China has already matched commitment with action. In 2014, for instance, the country invested $90 billion in clean energy, compared to $52 billion in the U.S., according to a U.S. government report.
Still, experts say implementing some of the policies in China will face uphill battles given the many overlapping jurisdictions and different reporting standards throughout the sprawling country. In their announcement Friday, China and the U.S. said they would develop a program to ensure transparency, but the details remain unclear.
Many in the U.S. and around the world have expressed skepticism about investing in efforts to fight climate change, arguing that costly efforts would lead to a free rider problem of sorts. They say under national plans to curb climate change, the U.S. would invest in expensive efforts to cut carbon emissions while other countries—primarily big developing nations like China and India—would reap the benefit without doing anything to slow their own emissions.
The argument has played out in public as recently as last week, when Republican presidential contenders suggested that government regulations to address climate change would leave the country at a competitive disadvantage.
“We are not going to destroy our economy,” said Florida Senator Marco Rubio, a GOP presidential candidate. “America is not a planet. And we are not even the largest carbon producer anymore, China is. And they’re drilling a hole and digging anywhere in the world that they can get a hold of.”
Meyer says this week’s announcement undercuts this opposition, leaving the U.S. to show how it will meet its commitment to cut emissions.
“This is yet another indication of momentum and seriousness,” Meyer said. “The job’s not done yet.”

China Climate Change Pledge To Barack Obama Also A Gift To Malcolm Turnbull

Fairfax - John Garnaut

Labor questions Turnbull's conviction: Labor is accusing Malcolm Turnbull of compromising on core beliefs including climate change, marriage equality and water reform. (Courtesy of ABC News 24). 

It used to be politically hard work for an Australian government to sell the case for policy action on climate change when the world's two great emitters were opting out of the game.
Now that China's President Xi Jinping has arrived in Washington with an emissions trading plan, policy inaction has become the harder sell.
Quixotic campaigns against wind farms and other acts of enviro-economic sabotage are now politically untenable, if they weren't already.

President Barack Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping at the White House in Washington on Thursday ahead of crucial talks. Photo: Manuel Balce Ceneta

And the global headwinds on climate policy that helped destroy the Rudd and Gillard governments, and bring Abbott to power, have turned into a tailwind for Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull.
Mr Xi's national cap-and-trade emissions reduction scheme, which he will reportedly announced on Friday Washington time, will not be without problems.
Details will be hard to come by, and anyone who watched the development of other complex markets in China will rightly wonder whether it can be done.

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull. Photo: Andrew Meares

 Efficient emissions trading schemes require a degree of trust, transparency and regulatory autonomy which simply does not currently exist in China.
China's scheme will risk being rorted and possibly paralysed amid the contradictions of Chinese market-Leninism, if recent travails in the markets for shares, futures, bonds and currencies are anything to go by.
But Mr Xi's new emissions trading plan is symbolic of changes already made as much as a promise of things to come.
Climate change has become the centre of US-China cooperation under Mr Xi and Mr Obama, at a time of otherwise darkening relations.
Both leaders have relied on tough administrative edicts to meet energy-intensity and emissions commitments, in combination with underlying economic structural change. Together, they have altered what had been a catastrophically steep global emissions trajectory.
Emissions growth in China has been slowing for several years and may have even peaked. In the US, emissions have been declining since 2007.
The old Australian excuse of waiting for the world's two great emitters is no longer viable.
The world's most powerful leaders are giving Mr Turnbull a chance of working with Foreign Minister Julie Bishop and Environment Minister Greg Hunt to restore Australia's constructive role in the global fight against global warming, without upsetting the delicate chemistry of the Coalition party room.
Action in this area would have the important side-benefit of re-opening a productive channel of cooperation with China, at a time of rising regional tension.
The modest commitment to the Paris climate change conference later this year will become a floor for Australia's ambitions, rather than a ceiling.
In short, the geo-political climate is changing rapidly in Mr Turnbull's favour.

The Inconvenient Truth About Direct Action Comes From Turnbull Himself

The Guardian - Lenore Taylor

Malcolm Turnbull is now defending the policy he criticised, but his truths about climate change won’t go away and this stop-gap scheme will come badly unstuck 
 

Malcolm Turnbull at the memorial dedicated to war correspondents at the Australian War Memorial this week. Photograph: Lukas Coch/EPA

You asked for this Malcolm, standing in the wind outside the war memorial this week. You said journalists had “to hold up the truth to power”. But in the case of your climate policy you’ve made our job easy. You’ve said so much on the subject that for the most part we can hold up your own truth to yourself.
This mirror reflecting back your own past verities could become a bit of a theme in your prime

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ministership, with all that you’ve said and all the things that now constrain you. Or maybe it won’t – it’s still too early to say.
But since you’ve asked for them, here are some of your own truths about climate change.
Lately you’ve claimed the $2.5bn emissions reduction fund (ERF) – part of the Direct Action climate policy you once ridiculed but have now inherited – has been “very successful” and that “all of the advice we have suggests that the government’s policies will achieve the reductions ... that we’re taking to the Paris conference of the parties.”
On Friday (as China – yes, China – announced a start date for its national emissions trading scheme) your environment minister Greg Hunt went so far as to say ours is the “best and most efficient scheme in the world”.
But we all know that’s not true. Not as it stands. And we know you know it because you’ve stuck a pin in its problems yourself.
First – trying to meet deeper emissions long-term reductions by buying them with the ERF is going to become too expensive.
The scheme might meet the 2020 target (a 5% cut of 2000 levels by 2020) but if it does it will be in large part because we vastly overestimated what our emissions would be – the job is now less than a third of what we expected.
But to get to our next target (a cut of between 26% and 28% by 2030) it will cost a bomb. As you told Lateline in 2011 “if you want to ... cut carbon emissions ... in a very substantial way to the levels that the scientists are telling us we need to do by mid-century to avoid dangerous climate change, then a direct action policy where ... industry was able to freely pollute, if you like, and the government was just spending more and more taxpayers’ money to offset it, that would become a very expensive charge on the budget in the years ahead.” Pretty much every expert agrees with what you thought back then.
Second, it’s very hard to know whether the ERF is actually buying emission reductions or just paying people to do things they would have done anyway.
Direct Action’s first “reverse auction” spent $660m to reduce Australia’s expected greenhouse emissions by 47m tonnes, which you and Greg Hunt now claim was a stunning success.
On close examination that’s questionable.
It spent $300m to make sure farmers around Cobar and Bourke who had already promised not to clear trees on their land, continued to keep that promise. Most of them had been getting money under the former government’s carbon farming scheme. Perhaps they would have started clearing again had they lost the government income stream but almost no one thinks they ever intended to clear all the land they were permitted to clear, and for which they are receiving payments to leave alone.
Another $200m went to ensure that garbage dumps, mines and livestock operations that were already capturing the potent greenhouse gas methane kept on doing what they were already doing. Most of those projects had been around for a long time, had already recouped their capital costs, were generating an income and would have continued even without additional government funding.
Back into 2010, you were also already onto this obvious pitfall.
“Arguments of considerable ferocity will arise as to whether a new piece of equipment would have

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been bought anyway with the risk that the government ends up funnelling billions of dollars to companies to subsidise their profits without achieving any real additional cuts to emissions,” you told parliament, with remarkable prescience.
As you knew, usually when governments pay for these kinds of projects the lucky grant-winners have to try to demonstrate that the money is essential for them to do some greenhouse-gas reducing thing in addition to what they would have done anyway.
But in the case of these projects the Direct Action legislation let them off. It assumed “additionality’ and did not require it to be proven – in the interests of “investment certainty”. We avoided the ferocious arguments you predicted but we have no idea whether all our money went on buying new emission reductions or not.
Is that really “stunning”, or as you said before “a recipe for fiscal recklessness on a grand scale?” We’re pretty sure we know what you would have concluded.
Third, there’s the other element of your policy that could possibly reduce emissions – the “safeguards” mechanism – the bit that sets “baselines” for big industrial emitters. Except the current draft rules explicitly state that it’s not even trying to reduce emissions, it just aims to make sure they don’t go up and undo all the emission reductions the ERF is buying.
And expert analysis, for example by Reputex, suggests it will fail even in that astonishingly modest aim, and instead allow the country’s biggest emitters to increase their greenhouse pollution.
You actually have a chance to change this – consultation on the draft rules closed last Monday, and independent senator Nick Xenophon is saying if they aren’t given at least some “teeth” he’ll disallow them in the Senate – a threat that may not have concerned your predecessor but he’s thinking might just give you pause.
Tougher baselines would start to create a baseline and credit emissions trading scheme. Will you do it? Is that what Hunt has planned after the review you’ll be holding in 2017? If it is you’ll have to give up on the line that you’ve found a way to reduce emissions without any impact on consumer prices.
Fourth, if we are going to reduce emissions we have to change the way we generate electricity. Yes, we have a renewable energy target, but the general policy uncertainty means even the political truce on that issue has not restarted investment. The biggest increase since the abolition of the carbon price has been the dirtiest brown coal fired power.
And we know you know this too.
“The transition from a high emission economy to a low emission one cannot be achieved without major changes to the way we generate and use energy,” you said. “Given that the cheapest fuels are generally the dirtiest, in the absence of a clear carbon price signal, new capacity is likely to be coal rather than gas, rather than renewables.”
Yes, your predecessor was forced into a deal on the renewable energy target, but the ongoing uncertainty means retailers still aren’t building the large-scale renewable developments that are required. You are going to have to give them a sign.
We understand you had to make some concessions to become prime minister. You have promised to work within the current scheme, which Hunt always hoped would morph into a baseline and credit trading scheme over time. And yes, you need time to consult and make decisions, to add or amend or change. To take your own side with you. But your own truths won’t go away and as it stands this stop-gap policy will come badly unstuck.