Chinese panel proposes trading plan for emissions

Reuters
Published: March 26, 2009

BEIJING: A top Chinese state panel has proposed a global greenhouse gas trading plan to reflect the different historic emissions of rich and poor nations, showing deepening discussion in Beijing about climate change policy.
Researchers from the State Council Development Research Center, which advises China’s leaders, laid out the plan in the March issue of the Economic Research Journal, a Chinese-language publication that reached subscribers this week.
The plan is far from being government policy. But it illustrates the growing focus of decision-makers here on how Beijing should handle climate change negotiations toward a new global pact by late this year.
China is now widely believed to have passed the United States in annual emissions of carbon dioxide from industry, farming and land clearance, and it faces calls from other governments to give clearer commitments to minimize and reduce such greenhouse gases, which scientists say are dangerously heating the atmosphere.
The Beijing group’s plan seeks a solution to the divide between developed nations that have high per-capita accumulations of greenhouse gas emissions and developing nations, including China, where such emissions are set to rise in coming decades.

he answer, they write, is to set emissions rights for each country on the basis of historic accumulations and then let nations trade portions of those rights in an international market.
‘‘If every country’s emissions rights can be clearly defined and strictly protected, and a corresponding mechanism for market transactions can be established, emissions reductions will become a form of behavior that offers a return,’’ they write. ‘‘This will provide a powerful impetus for developing low-carbon technology and a low-carbon economy.’’
The proposal would draw China and other poorer countries into clearer obligations to curtail greenhouse gases in the long term. But it would give their citizens larger emissions quotas than rich countries’ populations, reflecting the developing world’s low historic emissions and ‘‘right to develop.’’
Under the current Kyoto Protocol, the U.N.-backed pact governing countries’ climate change obligations, China and other developing economies do not shoulder caps on greenhouse gases.
The United States previously cited China’s lack of caps as one reason for Washington’s staying out of the protocol’s obligations.
President Barack Obama is pushing Congress to develop a system that would cap greenhouse gas emissions and require that companies purchase permits to release such gases.
But his administration and other Western powers will still press China, India, Brazil and other big developing nations to offer clearer commitments in the successor pact to Kyoto, which negotiators hope to settle in Copenhagen in December.
Separately, a new report from the Chinese Academy of Sciences proposes that the nation’s total emissions of the main greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, peak between 2030 and 2040 and then stabilize and fall, helped by international technological and funding support, the official Guangming Daily reported Wednesday.