Climate Expert Says China Committed To Battling Climate Change -- Even If The U.S. Drops Out Of Paris Accord

With Donald J. Trump the President-elect of the United States, the momentous Joint Agreement on Climate Change, signed by U.S. President Barack Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping, which was heralded as a rare moment of policy coordination, may soon be relegated to the dustbin of history.
On the American side that is.
The good news is that China will stick with its pledge to peak greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 or sooner, according to Chen Zhihua of the NDRC, China’s Chief Climate Negotiator. While India and other nations might vacillate in the face of a U.S. retreat, why is China standing firm?

Dr. Xu Yuan (photo courtesy of Xu Yuan)

I turned to Dr. Xu Yuan, a tenured professor at Chinese University of Hong Kong, for his opinion. Dr. Xu has done extensive research into China’s toughest climate and environmental problems, and I was fortunate enough to meet him in person on a recent trip to Hong Kong.
In a post-election email exchange Dr. Xu wrote:

I still believe that climate change is a gift from heaven for China to organize and solve so many domestic problems holistically…because these things are what China wants to achieve domestically, to stay committed internationally does not actually require significant additional costs but could receive much benefit.

Recommended by Forbes

(A link to Dr. Xu’s article on the subject for The EastAsia Forum is here.)
There is clear evidence of climate and environmental measures building in importance for China in the 11th and 12th Five-Year Plans, culminating in even more ambitious goals in the 13th, which runs from 2015 to 2020. And if China’s air and water pollution issues aren’t solved soon, serious civil unrest could result. Anyone who follows China knows this in the abstract but the work of academics like Dr. Xu can really help deepen our understanding of what China is doing and how the implementation is going.
Dr. Xu’s expertise stems from a deeply personal interest in environmental issues. He contracted chronic pharyngitis (an inflammation of the mucous membranes in the throat) as a teenager, from living beside a cement factory for four years. “We had another cement factory and a small coal-fired plant nearby as well, with much of the pollution untreated. The acute cough problem turned into a chronic one fairly quickly,” he wrote me.
Through undergrad and grad school, at Peking University in Beijing, he studied climate issues, and his Ph.D. thesis (supervised by renowned environmental scientist Robert H. Sokolov) is entitled “Democracy and the Environment — A study of China’s SO2 emission goal and SO2 scrubbers in the 11th Five-Year Plan.”
Dr. Xu’s research often combines behavioral economics with rigorous numbers-crunching and data verification through field studies. A quick review of some of the research gives a sense of its usefulness, not to only to those interested in China’s role in environmental politics, but to policymakers in the Chinese government.
Earlier this year, Dr. Xu co-authored, “Potential for Shale Gas in China: Demands for Water,” a study that checked what the impact on water resources would be if Sinopec — one of China’s biggest oil and gas concerns — were to meet its drilling targets for natural gas using fracking (for China, a shift to natural gas and away from coal is positive). The paper concluded that the water resources in the region studied were sufficient, but that the regulations in place to force Sinopec to clean the water after it had been used in hydraulic fracturing were insufficient to prevent potential problems.
The work of academics like Dr. Xu is often a valuable unbiased peek behind the curtain at policy works-in-progress. Take China’s much heralded carbon-trading scheme, for example.
Carbon cap-and-trade is one of the big policy tools currently in use to help China peak its greenhouse gas emissions “around 2030.” Carbon-trading is in test mode in six pilot markets, and covers its largest-emitting industrial sectors: power generation, metallurgy and non-ferrous metals, building materials, chemicals, and aviation. Longer-term, the goal is to integrate the regional markets to make it a national effort.
When I asked Dr. Xu about how the carbon-trading pilot was going, he observed candidly, “I am pessimistic,” noting “The current research should be revised to reflect policy interaction.” (Soon he will do just this in an as-yet-unpublished article.)
“Observed carbon pricing varies widely across pilot regions,” he says. “In some markets, the regional [price] variation can be as great as 3X. The initial assumption is that there are no policies in place. Into this void, a national carbon trading scheme would be theoretically very cost-effective. But at a regional level there was never a void of regulatory structure relevant to emissions, which could undermine the theoretical benefits in reality. And there is evidence of regional governments intervening excessively which affects pricing and transactions in their markets.”
It is interesting to look at China through Dr. Xu’s informed lens and to reflect on the second part of what he wrote me, about China’s international role: “to stay committed internationally does not actually require significant additional costs but could receive much benefit.”

Recommended by Forbes

That is so true. In fact, it plays right into China’s hands to be a climate leader and to export their own technology and know-how to nearby neighbors through their “One Belt One Road”(OBOR) strategy and to use the newly created Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) to help finance it.
Great for China, and we want them to succeed. But what a missed opportunity for the U.S. I wonder if President-elect Donald Trump sees that he is ceding an important leadership role on the world environmental stage to China?