CHINA JOINS THE CLIMATE SKEPTICS?
Let’s review the climate diplomacy story so far. The elephant in the room
at the UN negotiations has always been China, India, and other developing
nations who have steadfastly refused to agree to future limits on their use
of affordable hydrocarbon energy, which they rightly see as the path to
becoming fully middle class nations as we and Europe did. The Chinese
told Al Gore in Kyoto in 1997 when Gore was begging them to agree to
future limits at some point: “We don’t understand you Americans; do you
expect us to be poor forever?” The Indians were equally direct, telling
Gore: “You people in the West got rich on fossil fuels, and now it is our
turn. When we are as rich as you, then we’ll talk about emissions limits.” (I
heard these accounts off the record from career State Department people
who were present in Kyoto, and who were harshly critical of Gore’s role there.)
Here in this country it has always been obvious that an asymmetrical treaty that imposed higher costs on the U.S.
than our trading partners would be economically disastrous. Bill Clinton’s economists told him this in 1998, which
is why Clinton never lifted a finger to promote the Kyoto Protocol, and also why ratification of Kyoto was quietly
dropped from the Democratic National Platform starting in 2004.
I’ve always thought the cynical play for China would be to come out with an offer to agree to bilateral emissions
limits with the United States, which would remove the “China won’t go along” objection to emissions limits here.
The Chinese would surely treat it as the Soviet Union treated arms control treaties—as a massive opportunity to
cheat and gain further advantage over the U.S. Think we’d be any more effective with Chinese emissions violations
that we are with their intellectual property theft and currency manipulation? (Brief aside: At the various UN climate
negotiations, China has from time to time playfully suggested they might agree to some kind of emissions limits
provided they were given tradable emission reduction credits for the results of the population control programs
going back several decades. This always causes discomfort for the diplomats, most of whom privately approve of
China’s one-child policy, but know that, as a matter of human rights, they can’t admit this publicly, though in these
days of moral relativism and multiculturalism they would be hard pressed to give a coherent reason why.)
This is why my eyes perked up last weekend when I awoke to blazing headlines that Obama had reached a climate
deal with the Chinese at his snap summit out in California. “First of Its Kind Climate Deal Reached by US and
China,” said the headline in the Japan Times. “US-China Climate Deal Was Long in the Works, Reflects Shifting
Incentive for Developing Nation,” the AP proclaimed. Had the Chinese finally gotten clever and decided to pick
Obama’s pockets clean?
Turns out it is a very modest agreement, totally incommensurate with the headlines, that won’t touch energy use at
all: The U.S. and China merely agreed to lower the use of hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), which ironically are the
replacement chemicals for the CFCs that were phased out in the Montreal Protocol of 1987. HFCs are a potent
greenhouse gas, but relatively easy pickings as these things go. In other words, this agreement hardly ranks as a
“major” breakthrough from any point of view. But so desperate is the climate campaign and its media cheerleaders
that any agreement, no matter how small, is heralded as a breakthrough.
Much more significant but contrarian, and hence naturally drawing no media attention at
all, was the announcement from the Chinese Academy of Sciences (their version of our
NAS) that it has translated into Chinese the Climate Change Reconsidered and Climate
Change Reconsidered: 2011 Interim Report, products of the Heartland Institute’s
Non-Governmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC—heh). These reports
comprise over 1,200 pages of material that takes a sharply different view of the matter
than the U.S. scientific establishment. Sounds like the Chinese scientific establishment
has decided to sign up with the climate skeptics, or at least give their point of view a fair
hearing instead of just resorting to name-calling. It’s enough to give any self-respecting
member of the NAS here an embolism.
If you want to understand quickly and simply why China is never going to agree to any serious impediments on its
energy use, check out this 24-second video I made a couple of years back of comparing coal use history and IEA
projections for the United States and China through the year 2035.
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