An Insider Conversation: China, India, and the Illusion of Safety

Steve and Keya,

Thanks for taking time to exchange your views about climate policy and science with less than 3 months to Copenhagen. China and India are beginning to show that they are ready to negotiate, but we don't know what they will offer in terms of emissions cuts. Without them, there can be no meaningful global deal.

In an interview recently, Steve, you said that since the one-fifth of the world population in developed countries are responsible for three quarters of the accumulated greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, they have a "special obligation" to fix the problem they've created. But emissions in the developing world are skyrocketing. We might have started this fire, but the developing world is dumping on fuel.

And how much do you think the Chinese and Indians need to cut to make a significant impact?

Cheers, Eli

Not true, there can be a meaningful deal without India and China, but it loses its meaning soon.

The usual accusatory arguments are: "You, the rich created this problem and are 75% of accumulated emissions. You fix it and when we catch up to you per capita—a factor of five or so—then we'll take targets."

The developed countries typically reply, "Yes, we must do it but you are five times our population size so you can't multiply our emissions per capita times your population safely. So immediately we're in a question of constituency size—by country or by per capita—different theories of justice. But, until the initial polluters walk the walk it is doubtful the next generation of big polluters—the current least developed countries—will even start. So yes, without both, the long term is bleak from point of view of climate protection. But [the burden of going first should fall] on the initial polluters with large per capita shares. But agreed, that has to change soon.

My Jesse-Jackson-like cliche on this is: to save the climate everybody has to play, but not necessarily everybody has to pay—at least at first. The real tough part is how much—and how—the rich can contribute to help the least developed countries "leapfrog" over the industrial revolution techniques that made us rich: sweat shops, coal burning and internal combustion engines—we need a deal and soon to help out.

And yes, you can't buy insurance if you don't have the income to pay the premium. But [British economist Nicholas] Stern and others have argued that it will cost more to adapt and be harmed than to mitigate, not just in developed world. So it is an "act now" issue to prevent even worse later on--and that is why we need a deal across the rich/poor divide.

As to climate or clean water—the Lomborg phony frame—why didn't he say climate mitigation/adaptation or the Iraq war or subsidies to French farmers? Why just clean water versus climate investments? These are not direct tradeoffs, and we will not improve our water supplies via many degrees of warming! Yes, development is a priority in the least developed countries, but to do it unsustainably is very shortsighted and a bad investment. The issue is how to get politically palatable resource transfers from rich to poor with something in return for the rich. I suggest some ways in my next book, Science as a Contact Sport, due out 3 November.

They [developing countries] need to make major investments—with us as partners with technical and financial resources—so that they spend the next decade gearing up for a rapid transition away from conventional polluting technologies. In fact I am much less worried about what we cut percentage wise by 2020 anywhere than that we do not waste yet another decade arguing or fashioning targets without teeth, but rather invest the tens of billions a year now for next 2 decades to help us invent our way at least partly out of the problem. But that takes real investments.

Steve

Very good points. I'll just add one point about the differences between China and India.

China and India do have a few things in common—they are experiencing large amounts of economic growth in the renewable energy sector; they also have populations that are already vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, and both aspire to find ways to alleviate poverty in ways that do not damage the planet.

I do want to point out, though, that India and China are very different countries. In India, we still have a situation where much of the country does not have access to energy, and emissions as a whole are less than those of China or the US (and MUCH less than the US on a per capita basis). All the same, we expect that India will make some announcements about what they call their 'solar mission' and their 'energy efficiency mission' in the coming weeks. These programs will then need to be quantified so that India gets credit for them in global community.

In China, awareness about climate change is much higher than in the US. China really understands what's at stake, and the enormous costs of inaction on climate change. They've put stronger policies in place than we have in the US (e.g. their automobile efficiency standards are more stringent than ours). For the first time, last week at the UN they announced that they will not only have energy intensity targets, but will have emissions intensity targets. Those are climate change targets that they are putting forward for consideration, in addition to the stunning progress they are making on energy intensity improvements (see chart). I believe that they are ready to do what it takes to deviate significantly from the 'business as usual' trajectories.

As an observer in the UN climate talks, I can't help but point out that there are a lot of countries other than China and India. Earlier this week, just before the UN climate summit, a group of them from islands (AOSIS) pointed out that the survival of their nations is at stake, and that their people are already suffering due to coral bleaching events, saline intrusions, and more intense storms. Since this is what they experience at 3/4 of a degree of warming, they are terrified of increasing impacts. They are asking that global average surface temperature increases be limited to 1.5 degrees C ("1.5 to stay alive" is the catchy chant).

So, my questions for you Steve are, what work needs to be done by the science community to assess the level of emissions reductions needed to have a decent likelihood of limiting warming that much? Given how much warming we already locked into, over what work needs to be done to assess over what time scale we could get back to 1.5 degrees C? And with what certainty to we understand the impacts of various temperature increases on small island nations? I'm looking at the 'burning embers diagram' from Smith et al, and 2 degrees does look pretty bleak already.

Now, obviously we don't yet have the political will to limit warming even to 2 degrees... But that's my job to change, I suppose!

Keya

Keya,

Very good points that I fully agree with. As to the question of targets— what is safe, let me find a quote from Science as a Contact Sport to save time:

I don’t believe any single estimate is a threshold for dangerous climate change—we already have experienced some dangerous impacts in which climate change is partially implicated (for instance, Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and the 2003 killer heat wave in Europe were both likely intensified to some extent by warming). What level of warming pushes us past some tipping point is not precisely known, given the many uncertainties that remain, but it’s best described by a probability function—a bell curve. All you can say is the higher you go with warming above the present, the larger the number of systems that will be harmed and the more intensely they will be damaged. You would have to be crazy to take the risk that we will luck out on the bell curve and the threshold for Greenland deglaciation will be higher than anyone predicts—but that’s risk management, not scientific “truth.” (p 273)

We will likely exceed this EU dangerous limit—2 deg C—so the issue is how low can we keep the maximum concentration and how fast can we head back down off the back end of the [emissions] peak.

That is why I focus my numerology not on the target for 2020, but how many tens of billions we each—the big emitters that is—will spend annually for next generation to invent our way out the the highest risks. Wish there were such a thing as a "safe, realistic target", but it is a chimera. Only safer and riskier targets, and now we are on a very risky trajectory.

Cheers, Steve

Steve,

I will just point out that the '2 degree target' is not just an EU target anymore! Last July at the Major Economies Forum, 17 economies agreed on language agreeing to this threshold. That implies that all of them (including the ones we've been talking about—the US, EU, India, China) now need to think about how to achieve a quick and low global peak and decline of ghg emissions, so they maximize the likelihood of avoiding the most catastrophic tipping points.

For that to happen, I'd love to make sure that the US emissions peak is actually in our rearview mirror! The stimulus package had some serious investment in clean economic recovery, and we're now starting to see that pay off. I'm at the G20 in Pittsburgh now, and we need this process to make sure that globally we do the same thing-- that we are able to make that investment in the clean economy. AND, that we find resources to support those countries that are most vulnerable now. If we can get some progress here in Pittsburgh tomorrow, we'll be well placed, politically, to get the world to agree to get off of our risky trajectory. Of course, all eyes will then turn back to the UNFCCC meetings in Bangkok [before Copenhagen] and to the Senate, where they are working hard to introduce a bill by next Wednesday.

Thanks for all the points to ponder on targets and more. As always, there is much to think about and much more to do. Back to work for me!

Keya