Citola Blog
Climate Policy Negotiation: When Mucky Meets Murky
Here’s a vex question for you: which is the murkier business – heavy industry, or climate policy negotiation around carbon trading?
Heavy industry is obviously the dirtier activity, given the amount of pollutants it generates. But it doesn’t get murkier than the world of climate policy negotiation right now, where individual countries, trading blocs and international organisations are all competing, in voices as loud as they are shrill, for the moral high ground.
Let’s start with the individual countries. China, now officially the world’s second-biggest economy after the United States, is more interested in carbon intensity than in the absolute levels of carbon emission. You can see the Chinese point of view easily enough. They want to grow their economy, and are prepared to do so use processes that are more efficient than the smoke-stack wastefulness deployed by what we still refer to as “developed” countries through the latter part of the Nineteenth and all of the Twentieth Centuries.
The thinking is obvious – if you’re huge, you must leave a big footprint. So, at least, the Chinese aspire to leave a light one. Allied to the reduced carbon intensity strategy which forms part of the latest five-year plan (yes, they still have those in Communist China) is carbon trading. So if the carbon intensity of production is a bit too high, Chinese companies will be able to acquire carbon offsets to offset it.
If you believe what you read in the official Chinese press, this may all become a reality by 2015. Some in the West claim that they do, and argue that the Chinese will beat the Americans to a proper trading system.
Meanwhile, the International Emissions Trading Association is set to host a big conference in the other Asian giant, India, next week. If you check out the objectives of the meeting, it all looks great. But the proposals are no more than that – proposals. If you’re kind, you’d call it a wish list. If you’re less charitable you’d think that we’re in the realm of pious aspiration here.
One thing’s for sure, both India and China will continue to grow at a fast and – barring a global economic meltdown – increasingly rapid rate.
But what about the supranational organisations? Aren’t the United Nations (UN) and the European Union (EU) supposed to be over this whole topic – particularly carbon trading - like the proverbial rash? In theory, they are. In practice, the two organisations look increasingly like the Ugly Sisters from a Cinderella pantomime, pouting and gesturing on the global stage.
The EU is making impatient noises about the perceived failure of the UN’s Clean Development Mechanism, and is threatening to act unilaterally to impose its own carbon-trading and ancillary systems. Maybe, just maybe, the EU will act – and so shame the laggards at the UN into taking action.
As we’ve pointed put in earlier blogs, we would have suffocated a long time ago if we’d held our breath waiting for developments. As things stand, it’s a question of producing a sustainable and well designed forestry and timber offering - with the hope, one day, of having the environmental benefits generated officially recognised as tradeable carbon offsets.
We can live in hope that the
We can live in hope that the proposals at the conference are something attainable and not "realm of pious aspiration", as above more and more countries and companies are realising that now is the time to think more about their impact on the environment, before they get left behind and it becomes more costly for them.
And China realises that the
And China realises that the global economy is transitioning towards renewable energy, sustainable development and ‘putting a price’ on pollution from the realisation that the environment and natural resources are finite. The earlier you act, the cheaper the cost of action and the better position you are in in the new 'green' economy.
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