Not all countries have that ol' American Can't Do Attitude. This cudda been us, but the Right said it would be bad for business to head down this road.
On climate change, China could show the way
Economic and business forces could come into play to prevent carbon output skyrocketing even if the Copenhagensummit proves a dud
Eric Reguly
Published on Thursday, Dec. 03, 2009 12:00AM EST
Last updated on Thursday, Dec. 03, 2009 8:13AM EST
Next week's Copenhagen summit on climate change, probably the most important international meeting since the Second World War, has been declared a failure even before it starts. The hot air emitted by negotiators from some 200 countries will produce no legally binding agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. At best, a political commitment to some sort of carbon-reduction effort will be made. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon has said as much.
With Copenhagen all but written off, is there any chance we can prevent average global temperatures from increasing more than two degrees? Any bigger rise and large parts of the planet would resemble downtown Detroit. But don't give up all hope, for economic and business forces could come into play to prevent carbon output skyrocketing even if the summit proves a dud.
The first factor is Chinese pride and technical prowess, both rising. The second is higher oil prices. The two are related.
China watchers, including the energy team at the World Bank, say a mixture of pride, fear of climate change, tight oil supplies and capitalist greed could turn the country in into a low carbon-technology powerhouse. For decades, Chinese sweatshops have filled Wal-Mart shelves with cheap, plastic junk that no one in North America or Europe would condescend to make. The Chinese, the watchers say, might be on the verge of a quantum leap in energy technology. Factories that once made bathtub toys would make lithium-ion batteries for cars.
Surpassing (instead of merely matching) the Americans and Europeans on the technology front would be good for Chinese national pride. The products would find global markets as carbon-reduction efforts gain momentum, Copenhagen agreement or not. They already are. Take BYD, a Chinese company founded in the mid-1990s whose specialty was making lithium-ion batteries for mobile phone companies such as Nokia.
In 2003, BYD founder Wang Chuanfu got into the auto business. Now he's putting the two sides together to make electric and hybrid cars, including a plug-in electric car with a backup gasoline engine. He plans to introduce the all-electric E6 sedan, with a claimed (though probably exaggerated) range of 330 kilometres, to the United States in 2010. Warren Buffett liked what he saw and bought 10 per cent of BYD a year ago.
The Chinese seem well aware of the carbon-reduction potential of electric cars. In transportation, "well to wheel" efficiency is the key variable: the efficiency of the vehicle measured all the way back to the point of fuel extraction. By some estimates, an all-electric car with batteries recharged by electricity from gas-fired plants is twice as energy-efficient as the Toyota Prius hybrid. The next generation of batteries will only improve the well-to-wheel measure.
Of course, dazzling Chinese electric-car technology alone would not prevent the planet from burning. For that, China would have to work miracles in renewable energy, make existing and future power plants marvels of efficiency, and develop ways to bury carbon dioxide (known as CCS, or carbon capture and storage). The technologies not only have to work, they also have to come quickly and cheaply, or at least be no more expensive than existing technologies, and find world markets.
Market power alone has no chance of creating the technological leaps required to reduce CO{-2} output between by as much as 80 per cent by 2050, the level required to keep a lid on temperature increases. As the saying goes, you cannot cross a chasm in two leaps.
But if any country has the potential to cross the chasm in one leap, Evel Knievel-style, it is China. The Chinese political system can mandate national priorities overnight, if it wishes, in the same way that the United States mobilized an entire economy overnight to create a weapons manufacturing juggernaut in the 1940s. For China, the motivation certainly exists.
Besides being terrified of rapid climate change, China fears rising oil prices: It is a net importer of oil. While peak oil is still a theory, there is more evidence every year that the cheap oil is gone and that global production may not rise much beyond the current 85 million barrels a day. The International Energy Agency says the world will have to invest $25.6-trillion (U.S.) by 2030 to meet new demand and replace old oil-and-gas infrastructure. Add it all up and China, whose economy never stopped growing even during the darkest days of the global recession, faces an awe-inspiring hydrocarbons bill.
China can pay that hydrocarbons bill, and transfer trillions of dollars of wealth to the OPEC countries. Or it can take the same money to finance a technological carbon-reduction leap and export it everywhere. With Copenhagen crumbling, we can only hope that China makes its big move soon.
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