China fears US Republican opposition in climate change talks
Lucy Hornby
Chinese climate change negotiators fear US Republican Party opposition could hamper a deal to limit greenhouse gas emissions, they warned ahead of talks beginning next week in Lima, Peru.
Earlier this month, Chinese leader Xi Jinping and US President Barack Obama unveiled an estimate that Chinese emissions would stop growing around 2030 alongside US targets. Republican politicians immediately came out against the Obama administration’s pledge.
“Because of internal politics in the US the Kyoto protocol was not ratified, so we are worried that we might face the same problem in the 2015 pact,” Xie Zhenhua, vice director of the national planning agency and the chief negotiator on climate change, told reporters on Tuesday. The Lima negotiations will be followed by a round in Paris next year where a global climate agreement could be sealed.
China’s leaders have been careful to avoid over-committing themselves ahead of any international climate accord this time around, after previous premier Wen Jiabao’s attendance at 2009 negotiations in Copenhagen was seen as a failure of Chinese diplomacy.
Mr Wen’s failure to negotiate directly in the final hours of talks at Copenhagen highlighted his inability to commit on behalf of a political system based on consensus among powerful interest groups.
In the West, China was portrayed as scuppering that deal. Mr Xi, who has spent the past two years consolidating power as head of China’s ruling Communist Party, has said China will act because of its own need to control pollution, not because of international pressure.
“There is a feeling that the announcement by Xi Jinping and Mr Obama changed the picture,” said Frederic Mion, president of French university SciencesPo which is helping organise the Paris summit. “The Chinese are now much more willing, less obstructive than we could have believed six months ago.”
This time around Chinese advisers and industry groups have built careful models for when carbon emissions would peak, based on projections of slowing economic growth, an expected shift towards a more service-oriented economy, and a smaller share for coal in the nation’s energy mix.
Mr Xie said he was confident in targeting “around 2030” rather than the earlier date that environmental groups believe Chinese could achieve if more aggressive policies were enacted.
“In 16 years there is lot of uncertainty, and trying to pin down a very accurate time or number down to two decimal places is actually not scientific,” he said, in a dig at the Chinese bureaucracy’s fondness for hyper-precise numbers.
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