11

HOPENHAGEN

We are participating in a slow-motion train wreck, yet all we can manage to discuss is the quality of the food in the dining car. Maybe this is because acknowledging the train wreck would require us to confront a slew of contradictions at the core of the entire modern industrial project.

—RICHARD HEINBERG, “CHINA’S COAL BUBBLE,” POST CARBON INSTITUTE

Late on December 18, 2009, Barack Obama set out to find Wen Jiabao. It was evening on the final day of a conference hyped as “Hopenhagen”—held in the Danish capital, the meeting was billed as providing hope for a planet worried about global warming. The Kyoto Protocol’s first commitment period would expire in three years, and a few weeks earlier it had seemed likely that the world’s governments might extend and strengthen the treaty. In his first White House speech, Obama had proclaimed that “America will not be held hostage” to a warming climate and that the “days of Washington dragging its heels are over”.1 Beijing, the other key to any solution, had released its first national climate change plan and announced that it would reduce China’s “carbon intensity”—a measure of how much carbon is emitted for every dollar the nation earns—by more than 40 percent over the coming decade. Activists had resisted the use of carbon intensity targets by other nations because total emissions can rise even as intensity falls. But China was not beholden to any cuts under the Kyoto Protocol, and many experts viewed the commitment as a sign that Beijing might move further.2

By December 18, the last day of the gathering, however, hope had largely been pummelled out of the meeting. Despite his rhetoric, Obama had not been able to commit the United States to emissions reductions. In June, the U.S. House of Representatives had passed the Waxman-Markey bill—a cap-and-trade scheme for carbon emissions—but the White House had failed to build support in the Senate. (Passage in the Senate requires 60 percent approval, and unlike in the House, where populous coastal states have more votes, in the Senate each state has two votes, giving more weight to conservative, coal-reliant states.) One hundred and thirteen national leaders arrived for the meeting’s final days, and when Obama addressed them that morning all he could offer was another promise hemmed by conditions: “Almost all of the major economies have put forward legitimate targets, significant targets, ambitious targets, and I’m confident that America will fulfill the commitments that we have made, cutting our emissions in the range of 17 percent by 2020 and by more than 80 percent in 2050, in line with final legislation.”

China had also failed to move further. The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, the umbrella under which the Kyoto Protocol was created (its full title is the Kyoto Protocol to the UNFCCC), committed all signatories to the goal of avoiding “dangerous anthropogenic interference” with the climate—a statement of intent to limit greenhouse gas emissions to some to-be-determined level. But it also recognised that industrialised, richer nations, which it termed Annex I countries, had greater responsibilities than developing nations. Annex I governments had promised to “aim” to reduce emissions to their 1990 levels, while every other country had agreed only to “mitigate” climate change, a loosely worded statement that allowed them to continue with business more or less as usual. Within the Framework Con-vention, this difference was condensed into a principal of “common but differentiated responsibilities”.

Since the Framework Convention was created in 1992, of course, China has grown dramatically. Its economy has sextupled and its carbon emissions have more than doubled; if negotiators had anticipated how rapidly China would rise, they almost certainly would have created a different treaty, perhaps requiring developing nations to reduce emissions after a fixed amount of growth.3 As the protocol was written, however, China’s emissions would not face binding reductions until some undetermined future date, and Beijing was entitled to technical and financial aid from richer nations.

Given how much had changed, many experts had hoped that China’s leaders would make further concessions in Copenhagen. But by the final day of the gathering it was clear that Beijing would not be moved. A few minutes before Obama spoke, Wen Jiabao, China’s premier, climbed to the podium. Looking out at one of the largest ever gatherings of world leaders, he began by reminding everyone that, overall, China was poor: its per capita gross domestic product “has only exceeded $3,000” and 150 million people lived below the poverty line of one dollar a day. He said that Beijing had “always regarded addressing climate change as an important strategic task” and reminded the gathering of steps China had taken, including its recently announced carbon-intensity target.

Then Wen laid out the core of Beijing’s well-worn negotiating position: the world should stick with the Framework Convention’s mandates (Wen said it should “maintain a consistency of outcomes”), account for historical and per capita emissions (“uphold the fairness rules”), focus on short-term reduction targets (and not, one read between the lines, set long-term binding goals that might commit China to fixed limits), and make sure developed nations actually reduce their emissions as required by the convention. (With the exception of the former members of the Soviet bloc, which had suffered an economic meltdown after the Soviet Union collapsed, few nations were on track to meet their goals.)

A few hours later, those battle lines put an end to hopes of reaching a new Kyoto treaty in Copenhagen. He Yafei, China’s deputy foreign minister, had gathered with top leaders and diplomats from twenty-five of the world’s richest nations. Negotiators had whittled down hundreds of pages of documents to a few key points aimed at limiting global carbon emissions in 2050 to half of what they were in 1990. An agreement had been drafted. But it left undecided how much of those reductions would come from industrialised—Annex I—nations and how much would come from everyone else.

More important, China and India opposed the inclusion of almost any hard targets. According to a recording of the meeting, an Indian negotiator said the group should not “prejudge options”, a statement Western leaders took to mean they did not want to set targets that might lock them into reducing emissions, however small. (According to the German magazine Der Spiegel, the Indian statement prompted German chancellor Angela Merkel to burst out, “Then you don’t want legally binding!”)4

The Chinese negotiator thanked the group for its suggestions but added that China “must not accept the 50 percent [global] reductions”, prompting French president Nicolas Sarkozy to call China’s negotiating stance “utterly unacceptable”. The West, Sarkozy said, was willing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent, but China, “which will soon be the biggest economic power in the world, says to the world, ‘Commitments apply to you, but not to us.’ ”

Obama reminded He Yafei that passing climate change legislation in Western democracies is difficult, as he had learned during his first year in office. “From the perspective of the developed countries, in order for us to be able to mobilise the political will within each of our countries to not only engage in substantial mitigation efforts ourselves, which are very difficult, but to also then channel some of the resources from our countries into developing countries, is a very heavy lift,” Obama said, adding that, “If there is no sense of mutuality in this process, it is going to be difficult for us to ever move forward in a significant way.”

The logjam led to the Copenhagen Accord, a document that was more holding action than progress. Later that night, Obama—who was in a hurry to beat a storm to Washington—tracked down Premier Wen, bursting in on him and a small group of other leaders. Working together, they sketched out an agreement that committed governments to the goal of keeping the planet’s temperature from rising by more than 2 degrees Celsius.

The accord, however, had no teeth: there was no way to enforce compliance. When it was presented to the entire conference late that night, many delegates were furious. The Sudanese chair of the Group of 77, a coalition of the world’s poorest nations, equated the document to “a suicide pact, an incineration pact, in order to maintain the economic dominance of a few countries.” A Venezuelan delegate cut her hand and asked if she had to bleed to be heard. “You are witnessing a coup d’état against the UN,” she said. (As the delegates were about to formally reject the document, a last-minute technical manoeuvre created a motion to regard it as “noted”.)

As news broke, analysts began to dissect what had happened. Mark Lynas, a climate change adviser to the Maldives who attended the meeting with China, the United States, and two dozen other nations, reported that China had insisted that most of the numbers—which would have created a workable framework for cuts—be taken out: a commitment to a global emissions peak in 2020 was replaced by a suggestion that emissions should peak “as soon as possible”; the long-term target of cutting emissions to half of the 1990 amount was excised; the Chinese delegate even insisted on removing an aspirational target of keeping the global average temperature rise below 1.5 degrees Celsius but was shamed into allowing it to remain.5

“All this raises the question: what is China’s game?” Lynas asked in an editorial. He pointed out that China had shown growing concern about global warming and was “strong in both the wind and solar industries”. But “China’s growth, and growing global political and economic dominance, is based largely on cheap coal,” he added. “China knows it is becoming an uncontested superpower; indeed its newfound muscular confidence was on striking display in Copenhagen. Its coal-based economy doubles every decade, and its power increases commensurately. Its leadership will not alter this magic formula unless they absolutely have to.”

Ed Miliband, Britain’s climate and energy secretary, wrote that “despite the support of a coalition of developed and the vast majority of developing countries”, China had vetoed key numbers sought by the West. But he was more diplomatic about the significance of Beijing’s actions: China’s muscular approach was “one of the straws in the wind for the future,” he wrote, adding that “the old order of developed versus developing has been replaced by more interesting alliances.”

Miliband seemed to suggest something that other experts have said directly: the United Nations had proven too large and fractious to create a strong climate change treaty; any effective legislation would have to begin with talks within a much smaller pool of nations controlling the largest share of emissions. In all likelihood, they will revolve around only two: the United States and China, the nations now jointly responsible for 40 percent of annual global carbon emissions, the superpowers carefully eyeing each other across the Pacific.

As I continued reporting after the Copenhagen meeting, I heard that argument again and again: any significant global warming treaty will have to be hashed out between Beijing and Washington. Jerry Fletcher, a West Virginia University economist who ran part of the U.S.–China Clean Energy Research Center, the most significant (but still poorly funded) bilateral effort to develop renewable energy, told me that if the United States and China can create a working agreement to control greenhouse gas emissions, the rest of the world will follow. “The U.S. and China are big enough that once they go, everyone goes,” he said.6

Xu Jintao, an expert on global warming at China’s Peking University, said that in light of Copenhagen’s failure, global efforts should focus entirely on getting China and the United States to act. “When we think about emissions reductions . . . the rest of the world doesn’t matter much,” he said. “If China doesn’t take a more positive position, we may as well do nothing.”

Stapleton Roy, who had served as the U.S. ambassador to China when the UNFCCC was created, argued that if Beijing and Washington “aren’t prepared to get serious about global warming issues, since we contribute the most, other countries aren’t going to be able to discipline themselves to do anything serious.

“In terms of dealing with China, the most important thing is that if we’re going to advocate policies that will have costs for the Chinese economy, we have to be in a position to show that we’re willing to pose the same costs on our own society, and I’m not sure we have a strong position on that,” Roy said.

For their part, the Chinese seemed satisfied by the outcome in Copenhagen. A rare leaked internal document commissioned by the Ministry of Environmental Protection and circulated to top Chinese officials shortly after the gathering argued that the West had conspired to undermine the Kyoto Protocol’s distinction between developed and developing nations but that “the overall interests of developing countries have been defended”.7

“It was unprecedented for a conference negotiating process to be so complicated, for the arguments to be so intense, for the disputes to be so wide and for progress to be so slow,” the report stated. “There was criticism and praise from all sides, but future negotiations will be more difficult.”

I had flown from Boston to Copenhagen at the beginning of the second week of the UNFCCC meeting and arrived to a cold, windswept chaos. The United Nations hadn’t anticipated how many people would show up in Denmark and had accredited thousands more than could fit in the conference centre; I spent my first half day waiting outside the building in freezing temperatures as a long line snaked slowly toward its doors.

When I realised I wouldn’t get in, I abandoned the conference to wander the city. Tens of thousands of activists, protesters, and pundits had arrived and many had set up tents in its downtown, which, with street after street of pastel ornamental buildings, resembled a collection of giant wedding cakes. I walked for hours between various stalls and encampments. In a cobble-stone square, WWF had erected a life-size ice polar bear that was slowly melting. A group of artists had strung sinister-looking red lights at a height of seven metres, the level the oceans will reach if Greenland’s glaciers melt. Other groups held press conferences to announce new data about retreating sea ice and increased Amazon clearing and worrying shifts in animal migrations.

When I finally got inside the conference centre a day later, I found a different kind of jockeying: a drumroll of accusations, threats, grandstanding, denialism, and leaked documents that highlighted the political theatre of international climate change negotiations, a drama that should be played as tragedy but frequently descends to farce. Over my first few days at the confe-rence, various delegations traded barbs over the obvious impasse, a strategy that seemed aimed more at passing the buck than at solving problems. U.S. delegates said they could not offer greater commitment until China accepted international monitoring of the country’s emissions. The Chinese delegation said it would not accept monitoring as “a matter of principle”.8 Politicians and celebrities took advantage of the media frenzy to push their agendas. Al Gore called on President Obama and the Senate to pass climate legislation by the coming Earth Day. Representatives of the world’s poorest nations staged a walkout to protest inaction by richer countries. A group of Republican lawmakers held a press conference attacking the science of climate change: Joe Barton, a congressman from Texas, said he did not believe “that the theory of anthropogenic climate change has been proven”; John Sullivan of Oklahoma argued that “when there’s so much fraudulent data out there and there’s this culture of corruption in the scientific community, I don’t think anyone can come to a conclusion whether it’s real or not.” At night many of us—politicians, negotiators, scientists, protestors, journalists—retired to overpriced restaurants to dine on pickled herring and drink mulled wine.

I also found the discussions, and the media’s echo chamber, confusing. What, for example, did it mean that China had pledged to reduce its carbon intensity by at least 40 percent by 2020? Some experts argued that the pledge would produce a significant carbon savings. Others called it greenwashing: because China’s economy was growing rapidly and, over time, would require less heavy industry, which was migrating to nations with cheaper labour, its carbon intensity would drop anyway. Or, what did the Obama administration’s promise to reduce U.S. emissions “in the range of 17 percent by 2020 and by more than 80 percent in 2050, in line with final legislation” mean, given that the Senate had not passed the Waxman-Markey bill and seemed unlikely to pass significant climate legislation any time soon? (After the Republican Party won control of the House of Representatives in 2010, quick passage of a bill became even less likely.)

Most important, all of the politics were overlaid by the fact that despite understanding the risks of climate change for decades, the planet’s emissions have increased dramatically. Three months before the Copenhagen meeting, UNEP released a report summing up recent science. Among its findings was that global growth in carbon dioxide emissions from energy and industry had exceeded even the most fossil fuel-intensive scenario envisioned by the IPCC at the end of the 1990s: between 1990 and 1999, emissions grew an average 1.1 percent each year; from 2000 to 2007, they grew an average 3.5 percent; emissions in 2010 would be the largest in human history.9

With the exception of a few countries, it was unclear how much governments actually wanted to deal with the problem: from a planetary perspective, we were poking holes in the bottom of a sinking ship even as we debated how to plug them.

The confusion has been compounded by contrasting views of China. In recent years, two main narratives have emerged. In one, China is portrayed as the world’s destroyer: its growth is so large and rapid that it alone could sink efforts to curb climate change; Beijing’s commitment to development is so strong that its leaders are unwilling to bargain if a treaty would slow its economy. (This is the argument Mark Lynas made when he said China’s economic rise was “based largely on cheap coal” and Beijing “will not alter this magic formula unless they absolutely have to”.)

In the second narrative, China plays a green-tech saviour. Even as China has become the world’s top source of carbon emissions, it has also become its largest producer and consumer of renewable energy technologies. In 2009 it surpassed the United States as the world leader in clean energy finance and investment. More recently it has become both the world’s largest market for wind turbines and its largest manufacturer and exporter of solar cells. (In 2007, only two of the world’s top ten producers of solar photovoltaic modules were Chinese; by late 2011, seven were.)10

Equally important, China’s manufacturing strengths—together with government subsidies and easy access to low-interest loans—have driven down the cost of both technologies: in late 2011 the price of a wind turbine was roughly one-third what it had been four years earlier; the cost of solar panels had fallen by 40 percent in a single year. In some parts of the world solar electricity had become competitive with coal- and gas-fired power plants, the Financial Times reported.11

And China is likely to push the cost of renewable energy even lower. Worried about energy security, transportation bottlenecks (caused by China’s overloaded roads and railways, which are needed to move fossil fuels), and growing pressure to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, Beijing mandated in 2005 that renewable sources (including hydroelectric dams) will meet 15 percent of its total energy demand by 2020, a policy that will require the nation to build large new wind and solar farms and to quintuple its nuclear capacity. The International Energy Agency envisions that over the next twenty-five years, China could add wind and solar power almost equal to everything installed globally in 2011.12 In a 2010 report called “Who’s Winning the Clean Energy Race?” the Pew Charitable Trusts stated that China “is emerging as the world’s clean energy powerhouse”.13

China is thus pushing the world into a future powered increasingly by re-newable energy even as it helps push the world over the climate change cliff. At first, this seems like a paradox. But it is precisely because China is so large and is growing so fast—and because it hit its economic stride when the world’s atmosphere was already dangerously full of greenhouse gases—that Beijing is investing in renewable technologies.

What is clear is that China is a game changer—some say the game changer—for both climate change and how we deal with it. Its greenhouse gas emissions will surge, perhaps almost doubling before they peak, but when the world finally acts it is likely to emerge as a leader in the new-energy economy.14

The big questions are when that will happen and what the world will look like when greenhouse gases finally stabilise, and I spent much of my week in Copenhagen talking with scientists about how various pledges might move the planetary thermostat. By the end of the conference, the UNEP had found that the world had locked in less than half of the reductions needed to provide a 50 percent chance of preventing the temperature from rising by more than 2 degrees Celsius. A study by Germany’s Potsdam Institute found that even if every proposal made in Copenhagen were fully implemented, average planetary temperatures would rise by 3.2 degrees. A study by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Ventana Systems, and the U.S.-based Sustainability Institute calculated that the proposals would leave the world almost 4 degrees warmer by 2100.15

The results highlighted why climate change is the perfect “tragedy of the commons”: since we share a single atmosphere, growth by one nation can offset emissions reductions by others. Globalisation makes that seesaw effect more likely: if one nation phases out fossil fuels—if, say, the United States puts a heavy tax on carbon—its action would cause global oil, coal, and natural gas prices to drop as supply and demand reset, spurring consumption somewhere else.16

The dilemma is the opposite of the cold war’s concept of mutually assured destruction: instead of a situation where a nuclear strike by one nation means death for all, the refusal of one nation—at least one the size of China or the United States—to join emissions reductions can doom a treaty since, in a competitive global economy, nations must work to reduce costs. A few cents added to the price of a manufactured good can be the difference between success and failure, and few politicians can afford to require more expensive energy.

Without a technological breakthrough that makes clean energy cheaper than fossil fuels, there is little benefit and significant risk to taking the first step, and the more I studied the more I realised that, to truly address climate change, China and the United States will have to act in unison: it seems likely that we will move together or we won’t move at all.

Two years after the Copenhagen meeting I caught a taxi north from my Beijing apartment to Tsinghua University, China’s answer to MIT, to listen to Nicholas Stern address a room full of China’s present and future energy leaders. Stern was one of Britain’s top climate analysts under former prime minister Tony Blair, and he became famous when the British government released a document that overlaid climate change models with economic theory. Among other things, the study—which became known as the Stern Report—found that failing to curb global warming could reduce the world’s economic output over the twenty-first century by as much as one-fifth.

Since then Stern had taken an academic job, but he continued to lecture about global warming and China had become a frequent stop. When I arrived at the university’s lecture hall twenty minutes early, it was filled with several hundred students, professors, and officials.

The gathering felt sombre and serious. But Stern has been successful at raising awareness partly because he communicates in an accessible way. Often he frames climate change in terms of stories, and near the beginning of his lecture he sketched the broad strokes of how Homo sapiens have changed the physical planet: how we evolved some two hundred thousand years ago but only began cultivating large areas of land after the last Ice Age; how engineers have created technologies—in the late 1700s tapping the enormous power of fossil fuels—and communities have used them to increase their populations and material wealth; how those changes have dramatically impacted on the land, seas, and—for almost all of that period without our understanding—atmosphere. “The story starts with people and it ends with people,” Stern told the audience.

Climate change became a significant part of the story in the early 1990s, but until recently—Stern estimated roughly 2005—governments hadn’t done much to change course. Given the improving clarity of scientific modelling, however, global warming had become humanity’s most important challenge: while scientists “cannot predict with great precision the effects of greenhouse gases on global warming . . . [the risks] really call into question the whole relationship between human beings and the planet,” Stern said. “The planet will survive. The question is what will the relationship between human beings and the planet look like if we fail to manage climate change?”

Stern then sketched out some probable impacts of unmanaged warming—much of southern Europe will become a desert, cities and nations (“Cairo, Bangladesh, and so on”) will be flooded, hundreds of millions of people will be forced off their land—and laid out what he called “extremely simple” arithmetic showing how the world might avoid that future. To have a 50 percent chance of keeping the world’s temperature from rising by more than 2 degrees Celsius, he calculated that the entire human population should emit no more than 32 billion tons of greenhouse gases in 2030, significantly less than the 47 billion tons emitted globally in 2011.17

China now claims well over a quarter of that 32-billion-ton budget and, assuming a business-as-usual trajectory, could be responsible for almost half of it in 2030. The obvious point is that if China does not become more ambitious in cutting emissions, “the overall target would be almost impossible to achieve,” Stern said.

As stories go, the rest of Stern’s lecture was more of a fairy tale, if fairy tales occasionally come true. He acknowledged that, for the world to avoid “dangerous anthropogenic interference”, China—and presumably India, Brazil, Russia, and the rest of the world’s large developing nations—will have to accept slower growth, at least temporarily. “The story I’m telling is not a story of equity,” he told the audience. “It’s a story of inequity. It’s a story driven by basic arithmetic.”

But he postulated that China might do it anyway. In his fairy tale—which at this point began to lose touch with reality—“high-carbon growth killed itself. It created an environment so hostile that development stopped.” China would play a hero by launching a new clean-energy industrial revolution.

“I’ve argued that the world needs a new industrial revolution but I also want to argue that that revolution is a very exciting time,” Stern told the crowd. “This is a story of innovation, creativity, and change. We shouldn’t be frightened of the change. We should be excited about the change as an opportu-nity for really strong innovation and growth.”

I had returned from Tuojia village two months earlier, however, and it was hard to accept Stern’s optimism. Like David and his parents, most Chinese are focused on building comfortable material lives. China’s leaders know this and—because stability is their chief concern—believe they need to develop the economy while minimising inflation. Given China’s size, this is difficult, and Beijing has spent billions of dollars subsidising fossil fuels: as the global price of oil spiked to $145 a barrel in 2008, for example, the Communist Party capped the price of gasoline and diesel fuel; in 2010, it spent $21 billion, most of it to reduce the price of electricity.18 It seemed unlikely that the leadership would agree to a treaty that significantly slowed growth or raised prices.19

It also seemed unlikely that China’s leaders would move before the United States made serious commitments. Partly this is because of the Chinese concept of “face”: China’s leaders have argued publicly that Western nations need to cut emissions before they act. To change their position now would cause them, in direct translation, “to lose face”. Xu Jintao, the Peking Uni-versity professor, stressed the importance of this problem. “The Chinese government has money,” he told me. “It can do anything it wants. But it can’t act if the action is perceived as costing China or belittling China.”20

The predicament reminded me of an Escher drawing: a person moves in a logical direction but ends up back where he started. Hemmed in by energy lobbyists, concerns about manufacturing jobs, and fear about China’s rise, Washington seems unable to commit until China acts.21 Concerned about domestic stability and nationalism, Beijing is trapped until the United States moves. The rest of the world is stuck in limbo.

To deal with climate change that cycle must be broken, and it seems likely that Washington and Beijing will have to move together. Eventually, as the costs of global warming become more obvious, this will almost certainly happen. But Americans might also become more proactive if they recognise how the rise of China—and behind China, the rise of the rest of the developing world—has shifted the calculus of national interests. Whatever eco-nomic benefit the country gets from burning fossil fuels will almost certainly be offset by the costs of dealing with a heating planet caused—in the future—largely by other nations.

With his fairy-tale ending, Stern was more upbeat, but at the end of the lecture a young man stood up and asked if he thought the world would make the changes he envisioned.

“Am I optimistic or pessimistic?” Stern echoed, as if he was weighing the question for the first time.

“What I try to do and others try to do is show what can be done, and show why what can be done looks not only a sensible thing to do but an attractive thing to do. If you tell the story that way, you increase the probability of it happening. If you say we have to do huge amounts of things, indeed it’s so huge that it’s impossible, then nobody’s going to do anything. So our job is to show what can be done and to show why it looks good.”

“Will people actually do it?” he asked, looking out at the audience. “There, I don’t know.”