China’s Carbon-fuel Economic Trap
Related subjects: Asia / Pacific, Carbon Emissions, China, Climate Change, Diplomacy & Politics, Economy, Energy Supply, Environment & Ecology, Global, J.E. Robertson, Opinion, Renewable Resources, Sustainable Development, U.S. Economy, U.S. Politics, U.S. news, World Leader Pretend Comments (0)
China has outraged political and diplomatic leaders around the world by aggressively blocking agreement on hard targets for binding emissions cuts, refusing even to agree to any accord that would include mention of other nations’ specific cuts. One observer told the BBC that he observed China, India and Saudi Arabia as the key powers working to prevent binding targets from being adopted, but China was the most immovable opponent to a binding agreement.
The reasons are not hard to guess: China has invested unprecedented amounts of money (given the time-frame) in carbon-based fuels. Its efforts to expand the national capacity for coal-fired electric power plants and it’s holdings in oil-rich higly unstable African countries rivals Allied efforts to secure carbon-based fuel supplies during tye two World Wars.
But carbon-intensive energy systems are not just harming the environment, they are degrading vital natural resources and generating massive additional economic costs, already being felt across whole economies, but projected to increase drastically as climate change impacts worsen and mount.
The result is that China has signed over its potent economic growth to a kind of resource-relative Ponzi scheme. The number don’t add up, if China projects its behavior out over the long term. Extreme reliance on fossil fuels will eventually cripple its growth-driving sectors and limit it’s capacity to build future prosperity. Beijing’s current approach to the carbon-induced climate crisis appears to be rooted in a persistent unwillingess to face facts about the increasingly unsustainable nature of its carbon-fueled economy.
China can no more write off its historic investment in fossil fuels than Wall Street could just stop using unwieldy, unsustainable financial “exotics” and derivatives. The logic of a bubble economy, which buries its long-term costs under a glaze of rapid growth, easy profit and false abundance, is that the accounting method cannot become more honest, only less so. This is why China, despite devoting enormous amounts of productive capacity and new investment to developing the industrial infrastructure for supplying the green energy economy, will not tolerate a global agreement with binding targets for emissions cuts, and a transparent verification process.
That, and corruption. China’s banking system is notoriously opaque, firmly rooted in the hard ground of centralized power, and the spectacular expansion of private wealth through entrepreneurship has been closely intertwined with personal and family relationships linked to positions of high power in the Communist party. Corruption prosecutions are notoriously selective and often come only after significant signs of spreading public unrest.
But much more far-reaching than the question of China’s banking transparency or political corruption is the question of how China will provide resources for its booming economy and growing consumer class. Even as environmental degradation ravages the world’s most populous nation, with deserts rapidly expanding across the northwest and river systems under threat from contamination and other environmental factors, across the south and east, China has signed up for an 18th-century model of how to power economic growth, using unsustainable farming methods and privileging coal over most other fuel sources.
As the Copenhagen Accord is put into action, in the next round of international negotiations, in Mexico in 2010, attention needs to be focused on how to motivate both China and India to redirect behemoth industrial-scale funding for fossil fuels to a comprehensive, affordable approach to greening the entire infrastructure for energy production and distribution of industrial resources. Achieving that goal, whether through international funding incentives or a multilateral trade agreement, will help motivate the necessary awakening that will allow Beijing to admit to its fuel-economy catch-22 and make the hard choices to emerge from it.
CafeSentido Partner Sites: