China Emissions To Wipe Out West's Clean-Up Efforts
By Shai Oster
15 July, 2009
Dow Jones International News
ASIA
BEIJING (Dow Jones)--China's greenhouse-gas emissions growth is on course to wipe out gains from Western conservation efforts unless it intensifies clean-up efforts, U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu told audiences in China Wednesday.
In meetings with senior Chinese energy officials and in a speech at prestigious Tsinghua University, Mr. Chu continued the Obama administration's efforts to push for greater action on climate change.
China recently surpassed the U.S. as the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases.
While acknowledging that the world's developed Western nations have contributed most of the carbon dioxide already trapped in the atmosphere, Mr. Chu warned that China could add more in the next few decades than everything the U.S. emitted since the Industrial Revolution. Carbon dioxide is the most common greenhouse gas.
"trapped in the atmosphere"? Gee, too bad there's not some kind of natural carbon cycle or something.
" Carbon dioxide is the most common greenhouse gas." How does a sentence like that get written by someone writing for Dow Jones? Does the writer know CO2 is a trace gas measured in ppm? That the #1 GHG is water vapor?
"The developed world did make the problem, I admit that," Mr. Chu said in the speech to students of China's top science and engineering school.
"But the developing world can make it much worse."
Painting a grim picture of a world faced with making a tough choice between "something bad might happen or something very bad might happen" even if global warming is addressed, Mr. Chu urged China to invest more in energy efficient technologies in partnership with the U.S.
Mr. Chu is traveling here with U.S. Commerce Secretary Gary Locke on a mission to remove trade barriers hindering private-sector cooperation with China on clean energy.
Increasingly, China's involvement is seen as crucial to any efforts to combat global warming because of its vast population and growing commercial and technological might. Chinese officials acknowledge the problems of global warming, but insist the developed world should foot the bill and worry that curbing carbon could stymie economic growth.
China's resistance to any caps on its carbon emissions is contributing to difficulties in forging a successor to the Kyoto Protocol, the first global pact on greenhouse gasses, which expires by the end of 2012.
But the Chinese government is encouraging greater energy efficiency. Increasingly, China is on the forefront of many new green technologies such as solar, wind power and cleaner ways to burn coal - areas where the U.S. hopes to partner with the Chinese.
China has been moving ahead with developing next-generation clean-coal power plants that could eventually separate out carbon dioxide for storage. A similar project in the U.S. has run into trouble as some private partners in the government-backed FutureGen project have pulled out despite Obama administration support.
Yesterday, Mr. Chu and Mr. Locke met with Zhang Ping, chairman of China's top economic policy-maker the National Development and Reform Commission and Zhang Guobao, China's top energy official. |
