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This article documents the debate over China's economic responsibilities for climate change mitigation.
Both internationally and within China internally, there has been an ongoing debate over China's responsibilities, particularly since 2006, when China surpassed the US as the country with the highest emissions rate for the main atmospheric gas in global warming, CO2 [17].

The pros and cons

Sources arguing (as detailed below) that China should be spending more of its resources on mitigation, point out its total emissions, the criticisms it's received from other developing nations and from its own citizens, the toll of pollution on China's GDP, the lack of regulations that really have teeth in them, the cumbersome and overlapping delgations of responsibility, and China's refusal to commit to an emissions cap.

Other sources arguing (as detailed below) that China is doing the best it can with limited resources, cite its low per capita emissions, the large scale of its current mitigation efforts, its success at keeping emissions growth significantly less than GDP growth, the considerable chunk of China's emissions that are created by multinational businesses in China, the opposition from provincial and local officials to carrying out the environmental regulations, China's total CO2 as small (so far) compared to that of the industrialized nations over the last 200 years, and the seeming hypocrisy of those who criticize China for attempting to catch up with the West through the same CO2-emitting practices with which the West developed.

China should be spending more of its resources:

Highest total emissions

In 2006, China's CO2 emissions surpassed those of the US by 8%, according to the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency (http://www.mnp.nl/en). Compared to the previous year, China's total emissions increased by 9% (to 6.2 billion tons ofCO2), while emissions in the US decreased by 1.4% (to 5.8 billion), compared to the previous year [11], [17]. China's increasing rate of CO2 emissions is heading toward a 50-100% increase above the current world total for CO2 emissions, by 20 years from now. The scientists warn that if China continues to increase its GDP at a rate of at least 7% per year, it will by then be emitting as much CO2 per year as the whole world emitted in 2007, -- 8 gigatons per year[13].

Other developing nations are critical

Small island nations see China as among the developed countries in terms of China's responsibility to reduce emissions, particularly since it is the small island nations, and not China, that are most immediate risk from the effects of global warming[14]. They are aware as well that it is the world's poorest nations that will suffer most in the long run[30].

Internal dissent

Not surprisingly, there is pressure on the Chinese government from within China as well. "Citizen complaints about the environment, expressed on official hotlines and in letters to local officials, were increasing at a rate of 30% a year in 2006," and were projected to top 450,000 in 2007 [21].

The toll on GDP

A federal financial auditing project -- the 'Green GDP' -- has been an even greater embarrassment to China. Begun in 2004 to incorporate the externalities of previously unaccounted-for environmental costs, the project soon produced results that were so much worse than anticipated that the program was dropped completely in 2007 [11].

The fines for violating CO2-mitigating regulations are too low

Firms facing the choice of either paying a given fine for their effluence into community streams, or spending ten times as much on waste treatment, usually opt to pay the fine and continue polluting [19]. Provincial officials themselves complain that the fines are too low to enable them to enforce the federal regulations. [24]

Poor delegation of authority

The problem of ineffectual fines is compounded by the cumbersome delegation of authority over CO2-related issues. For instance, while water pollution as a problem is the responsibility of SEPA (China's equivalent of the US' EPA), the water itself, in its specific functions or locations, comes under the control of three other separate ministries: (Ministry of Construction deals with sewage, Ministry of Land and Resources controls groundwater, and the Ministry of Water Resources manages water in general) [11].

Indeed, the environmental damage in China is already costing its economy about 10% of its GDP [20], and is costing that in spite of the millions in venture capital invested in China by firms in other countries for mitigation projects via the Clean Development Mechanism [20].

China refuses a cap on CO2

Finally, critics point out that even though China bests the US by being a signer to the Kyoto Protocol (since the US is not), China signed under an agreement that it would not be required to reduce its emissions [13].

China should not be spending more of its resources:

The large scale of current mitigation

As of 2008, China's per capita emissions of CO2 were still one-quarter that of the US [22], [20]. Though China continues to build emissions-intensive coal-fired power plants, its "rate of development of renewable energy is even faster"[13].

One example is its world-class wholly-Chinese solar company (SunTech) [32]. In addition, China has embarked upon a 9 million acre (36,000 km2) reforestation project -- the great green wall -- that may become the largest ecological project in history; it's projected to be finished by 2010 at a cost of $8 billion [11]. China has 5 major eco-cities in construction or completed. The capital city has, as well, car regulations more stringent than those in the US [20].

Keeping emissions growth at less than GDP growth

Considering that energy consumption in most developed countries has usually grown faster than GDP during the early stages of industrialization, it is to China's credit that although its GDP has grown by 9.5% per year over the last 27 years, its carbon intensity (its carbon emissions per unit of GDP) has decreased during that time, rather than increasing along with the GDP. The reduction in carbon intensity for China has meant that its CO2 increase of about 5.4% per year has amounted to a little over half of its GDP increase during the same 27 years [13], [22].

Emissions contributed by multinationals in China

Chinese officials claim that they are doing a great deal that is often not visible, especially for a country as large, populous, and (rurally) undeveloped as it is. But working against that, and equally non-visible, is the role of multinational ventures in China in contributing to its emissions. As of 2004, almost a quarter (23%) of China's CO2 emissions were coming from Chinese-made products destined for the West [1], providing an interesting perspective on China's large trade surplus. Over half of those emissions driven by demand from the West are from transnationals in China, including many of the WalMart-supplier and other foreign-owned factories that stock department store shelves, particularly in the US [1], [20].

And China points out that it is being punished for having become "the place where the US effectively outsources much of its pollution [20]," and has buttressed its call for joint international responsibility for at least part of China's emissions, by making public, in Jan 2008, 130 violations of Chinese environmental law committed by multinationals in China [12].

Opposition from provincial and local officials

However, officials in Beijing cite violations by China's own companies as well -- in this case, to illustrate the enormity of the task in front of them in getting compliance for environmental regulations which they see as very progressive. Regional and local officials have been taken to task for this.

For example, in 2006, Premier Wen Jia-bao issued a warning to local officials to shut down some of the plants in the most energy-intensive industries, designating at least six industries for slow-down. The following year, those same industries posted a 20.6% increase in output [21]. In 2006 as well, the federal government began banning logging in some locations in order to expand its protection of forests, and at the same time restricted the size of cities and golf courses in order to increase land use efficiency. Yet many of the local officials responsible for carrying out the new regulations effectively ignored them [11].

Why, one might ask, is a strong central government such as China's not able to control maverick local and regional officials? The problem may have something to do with the fact that China's top environmental agency -- the State Environmental Protection Agency (SEPA) has barely one-hundredth the number of employees as the United States' EPA, while attempting to enforce regulations over a much larger and more populated land mass than the US. [20]

Another reason for lack of compliance is apparently is because local governments now have a chunk of funding for which they are not beholden to the central government, and are motivated to protect the sources of funding that pollute, but pollute profitably [32].

As a result, SEPA's attempt to use local banks as a means of discouraging companies from carbon-intensive practices has followed a troubled path. Many local governments that have officially implemented the 'green credit' policy of loaning only to companies with green practices continue also to protect polluting firms that are profitable, and the banks in some provinces have yet to apply the policy at all. [26].

China is following the example of developed nations

Given all the above, it's perhaps little surprise that China's leadership turns to the US and international bodies to press for funding and understanding in its struggle to reduce emissions -- since "developing countries need room to develop" -- and protest that China cannot tackle global warming to the West's satisfaction with its limited funds spread over a huge and populous country. They worry as well that China would end up suffering a slowdown in economic growth that would result in "massive unemployment and social unrest." [2] [5] [6]

To the Chinese, it appears ironic at best that China is being criticized for following the practice of 'pollute first, clean up later' that the Western nations themselves followed during their early stages of capital accumulation [15].

Chinese emissions vs. historical industrialized emissions

Chinese officials argue that China has been contributing to global warming for only 30 years, while other industrial countries have been doing so for 200 years [9]. And since the early stages of accumulating capital may have contributed to what China sees as a lack of balance of power between the US and China [4], it may see global warming mitigation as creating an economic burden that slows its economy and further exacerbates the unequal balance of power.[9]

Chinese officials point out that the highest per capita emissions have long been and still are in the developed countries, not in China [23], and that about 77% of the greenhouse gas emissions prior to 2000 were created by the already developed nations [2]. This implies that it is the developed nations who should shoulder a comparable portion of the global cost for reversing the world's emissions.

The lack of a cap on emissions is shared by many

Finally, the provision by which China signed the Kyoto Protocol without committing to a cap was the same provision given to all developing nation signers [22].

References

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