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11.12.14

The U.S.-China Climate Deal Is Mostly Hot Air

The Obama administration may be crowing about its “historic” emissions agreement. But China and the U.S. are already on track to meet these targets.

The United States and China announced new greenhouse emission targets late Tuesday night. Secretary of State John Kerry praised it as an agreement of “great consequence,” while the White House called it an “ambitious” target.

Don’t buy the hype. The announcement is largely a restatement of existing American and Chinese carbon emission trajectories, topped with a new red ribbon.

Through its standards on automobile efficiency, and soon-to-be finalized EPA regulations on power plants, the Obama administration has already set the United States on a path to cutting greenhouse gases by between 26 percent and 28 percent by 2025.

“The commitment on the U.S. side is a summation of a variety of commitments that have already been made,” Ethan Zindler, an analyst at Bloomberg New Energy Finance, told The Daily Beast. “The president can’t go out and promise new stuff—not even with this Congress, let alone the Congress he’s going to have next year.”

Once the EPA regulations on emissions at American power plants are finalized next year, Zindler said, the United States should already be on track to meet this goal.

As for China’s pledge to halt the growth of greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, well, it was already on that path. 2030 is the target for when the country’s urbanization, population growth and carbon emissions peak.

The U.S.-China agreement on carbon emissions may not be especially ambitions, but this does not mean that it is without symbolic consequence.

“What’s more meaningful is leaders putting their reputations and political weight behind ambitious emissions reduction targets,” Andrew Eil, a former State Department climate change program coordinator, told The Daily Beast. “The fact that Xi and Obama both put a lot on the line to demonstrate that climate is a big priority is very noteworthy… Most importantly, both for the U.S. and China, it’s a commitment to emissions reduction, full stop, that has not been made before.”

And there remains practical work to be done, Eil said. The EPA regulations scheduled to be finalized next year still needs to be put in the books, and implemented by the states.

“In both cases, hitting these targets will require significant action beyond the policies now on the books. Yes, there’s a proposal out there by EPA, but you can’t take for granted that these get implemented in time to hit these targets by 2025,” said Elliot Diringer, executive vice president at the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, a nonpartisan organization focused on climate change and energy policy.

Key American climate change groups expressed hopefulness at the agreement, but political realities have tempered the euphoria somewhat.

“The commitment on the U.S. side is a summation of a variety of commitments that have already been made. “The president can't go out and promise new stuff—not with this Congress.”

“We are confident that both [the United States and China] can achieve even greater reductions,” Frances Beinecke, president of the Natural Resources Defense Council, said in a statement, while simultaneously calling the commitment a “critical step.”

Going beyond the agreement outlined between China and the United States, however, would require Congressional action. Don’t expect this Congress to acquiesce silently to that request.

Just hours after the announcement in Beijing, Republican senators began to outline just how much they disdained the new agreement. Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, soon to be Majority Leader, called the goals an “unrealistic plan, that the president would dump on his successor.”

And Sen. Jim Inhofe, soon to be chair of the committee which oversees American environmental policy, tacked on his suspicion that China will not hold up its end of the deal: “China builds a coal-fired power plant every 10 days, is the largest importer of coal in the world, and has no known reserves of natural gas,” he said in a statement. “This deal is a non-binding charade."

China’s Climate Change Plan Raises Questions

BEIJING — When the presidents of China and the United States pledged on Wednesday to reduce or limit carbon dioxide emissions, analysts and policy advisers said, the two leaders sent an important signal: that the world’s largest economies were willing to work together on climate change.

“This is a very serious international commitment between the two heavy hitters,” said Li Shuo, who researches climate and coal policy for Greenpeace East Asia.

Still, many questions surround China’s plans, which President Xi Jinpingannounced in Beijing alongside President Obama after months of negotiations. In essence, experts asked, do the pledges go far enough, and how will China achieve them?

Mr. Xi said China would brake the rapid rise in its carbon dioxide emissions, so that they peak “around 2030” and then remain steady or begin to decline. And by then, he promised, 20 percent of China’s energy will be renewable. Analysts said that achieving those goals would require sustained efforts by Beijing to curb the country’s addiction to coal and greatly increase its commitment to energy sources that do not depend on fossil fuels.

Many scientists have said that 2030 may be too long to wait for China’s greenhouse gas emissions to stop growing, if the world is to keep the average global temperature from rising more than 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit (2 degrees Celsius) above the preindustrial average. That goal was adopted by governments from around the world at talks in Copenhagen in 2009.

Almost no country has done enough yet to reach that goal, but because of its size and industrial development, China is crucial to any effort to even come close. (So is the United States, which promised on Wednesday to emit 26 percent to 28 percent less carbon dioxide in 2025 than it did in 2005.)

Some experts said that China should try to halt the growth of its emissions much sooner than it has pledged, by 2025 rather than 2030.

“Based on China’s current coal consumption numbers, they can do much more,” Mr. Li said on Wednesday. He said of the pledges made on Wednesday that “this should be the floor on which they work, rather than a ceiling.”