China

The Environmental Protection Agency estimated recently that the United States emitted about 6,946 million tons of carbon dioxide-equivalent greenhouse gases in 2008. Or did it?

According to a study published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, taking a look at what Americans consume as well as what they produce could add more than 10 percent to the total.

Discussions of climate change keep running head-long into a barrier: China, India, Brazil and the other countries of the global South need to develop.

No leader of an underdeveloped country will ever agree to a climate change proposal that will take away that country’s right to develop. This isn’t so odd. Try explaining to the Chinese government that because the United States and Western Europe flooded the atmosphere with CO2 by burning readily accessible cheap fossil fuel for 150 years, their citizens will have to live without a decent standard of living, while we imperiously assert that we won’t divert more than a smidgen of our government budget to clean energy development and will keep occupying the country’s freeways and streets with gas-guzzlers.

Talking about a green revolution as a competition between China and the U.S. is like putting two teams on the same field that play different games. Yet, this has been the popular spin on news that China’s spending on smart grid technology will exceed that of the U.S. by $200 million. It has also been the spin on high-speed rail and the so-called "clean tech arms race."

But had this really ought to be understood as a competition? And is a fair comparison being made? The answer, according to some China experts, is no.

Major Chinese solar panel manufacturers are targeting the fast-growing Japanese market for their panels in 2010 and beyond. The U.S. sector remains fragmented, due to a lack of a national climate change policy, but it looks promising in the longer term, they say.

Japan is aiming for 28 gigawatts of solar power in 10 years. In comparison, current solar capacity worldwide is under 17 gigawatts.

"Some countries, when they put out a national goal, you don’t know whether they will achieve it, but Japan seems to have a good track record," said Shawn Qu, CEO of Canadian Solar, a Chinese manufacturer of solar power modules.

"If the [Japanese] government puts out the target, then they have the mechanism to make sure it happens."

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• Stacy Feldman's blog
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Circular 698 caused a momentary pause throughout the business anglo-sino-blogosphere late last year.

China passed a retroactive look-through provision that effectively changed the rules for foreign investment structures in China. The Circular in and of itself is relatively innocuous. It highlights an oft misunderstood Chinese business sensitivity in China’s central economic planning: China for Chinese business only.

As China carries forward its strategy to adapt to and mitigate climate change, foreign owned clean technology businesses need to be aware of China’s position.

By Kenneth Hewitt, China Dialogue
Part I of a three-part series

Glaciers are quite sensitive to climate change and, recently, there have been many reports of major changes in the Himalaya and other parts of High Asia; mostly of glaciers retreating fast. Impacts of a range of glacier hazards, and on the reliability of water resources, are of concern at local, national and transnational scales.

However, there is also a growing recognition that glacial conditions in the region are very diverse, and so are their responses to climate change.

There are some very different implications in different societal contexts, not least in relation to rapid socio-economic changes, water resource projects and security crises. The latter are often more urgent or immediate problems that disrupt or undermine peoples’ capacities to adapt to environmental change.

China, India, South Africa and Brazil — the so-called BASIC bloc of nations — said the nonbinding deal that came out of the Copenhagen climate summit was just a "political understanding" and that future climate negotiations must not be based on that plan.

The skeletal Copenhagen Accord was brokered among the BASIC nations and the United States in the frantic final hours of the December talks. The UN Conference of Parties 'took note' of its existence but fell short of the full support needed to adopt it.

In a statement released on Jan. 24, the newly powerful BASIC bloc said that it supports the Copenhagen Accord but that formal climate talks must move along two tracks only — one that would extend the Kyoto Protocol for the 184 nations that signed it and another that would add an agreement to govern the United States and emerging economies.

By Cao Haili, ChinaDialog

China’s policymakers are beginning to accept the use of market mechanisms to achieve goals on addressing climate change and reducing energy use.

There are currently three major exchanges in China that trade environmental and energy assets, in Beijing, Tianjin and Shanghai. All were set up with support from local governments, and all began operations in the past year.

The Kyoto Protocol, the world's only legal agreement to fight global warming, survived Copenhagen but its future remains very much in doubt.

The treaty, which binds 37 nations to emissions cuts, is still "an active agreement," but it appears "to be on life support," Erich Pica, executive director of Friends of the Earth USA, told SolveClimate.

The Dec. 7-18 Copenhagen talks failed to resolve the rich-poor impasse over the 1997 protocol.

Instead, the world agreed to "continue its work" on Kyoto until the next climate conference in Mexico in December 2010 — leaving open the possibility of downgrading or replacing it less than a year from now.

Reporting from Copenhagen

A new global warming pact, heralded by U.S. President Barack Obama as "an important milestone" and considered a done deal late Friday night, unraveled in the wee hours of Saturday morning, even though the world's biggest carbon polluters supported it.

The U.S. president had landed in snow-covered Copenhagen around 9 a.m. Friday, joining the tail end of critical two-week climate talks to help break a deadlock and broker a deal.