Any doubt about China moving ahead to cut emissions, a favorite talking point among climate deniers, will now be neutralized.
My video above reminds us that continued fossil fuel growth is not really an option for China. They must change, and now they’ll become the world’s biggest laboratory for putting a price on carbon.
WASHINGTON — President Xi Jinping of China will make a landmark commitment on Friday to start a national program in 2017 that will limit and put a price on greenhouse gas emissions, Obama administration officials said on Thursday.
The move to create a so-called cap-and-trade system would be a substantial step by the world’s largest polluter to reduce emissions from major industries, including steel, cement, paper and electric power.
The announcement, to come during a White House summit meeting with President Obama, is part of an ambitious effort by China and the United States to use their leverage internationally to tackle climate change and to pressure other nations to do the same.
Joining forces on the issue even as they are bitterly divided on others, Mr. Obama and Mr. Xi will spotlight the shared determination of the leaders of the world’s two largest economies to forge a climate change accord in Paris in December that commits every country to curbing their emissions.
Mr. Xi’s pledge underscores China’s intention to act quickly and upends what has long been a potent argument among Republicans against acting on climate change — that the United States’ most powerful economic competitor has not done so. But it is not clear whether China will be able to enact and enforce a program that substantially limits emissions.
Just to remind everyone of what “cap and trade” means, here’s the explanation given in the NYT article:
“Under a cap-and-trade system, a concept created by American economists, governments place a cap on the amount of carbon pollution that may be emitted annually. Companies can then buy and sell permits to pollute. Western economists have long backed the idea as a market-driven way to push industry to cleaner forms of energy, by making polluting energy more expensive”.
Nothing like relying on the bright ideas of “economists” to save the world (especially the western and American ones who brought us the Great Recession and before that the hugely successful “trickle down” concept). At least the NYT was honest when it talked about “buying and selling PERMITS TO POLLUTE”.
Doing something is better than doing nothing, but reliance on “market driven” concepts in the past is what has gotten us to the precipice. In today’s world, they all entail “growth” and “profit” rather than the greater good. CO2 needs to be attacked right now, and expecting the “markets” to do that is wishful thinking.
To a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
The world is run by economists, therefore to an economist everything looks like a balance sheet.
Sad that saving the planet has to be a side-effect of policy, instead of an overriding prime directive.
In the time that we in Australia had a price on carbon which was a precursor to an emissions trading scheme, our total carbon emissions went down. Within a month of our idiotic government removing the price our emissions went back up and have been on an upward projection since.
I’m sorry but “Natural Gas” is not cleaner than coal when it is obtained by fracking.
Quite apart from the water pollution from fracking wells failing (they *all* fail eventually), there is the issue of ‘leakage’. It is estimated by the fracking industry (so probably an under-estimate) that between 6% and 9% of the gas is lost between frack well seepage and transporting it to the power plant.
The only problem is that Methane is 30X more of a Greenhouse Gas than co2 (recent study showed it was worse than previously thought), so 6% leaking is like 180% of co2 and 9% leaking is 270% of co2’s ‘warming’ effect… i.e. natural gas is between 2 & 3 times worse (and that’s before you burn the other 90+% and release the co2 from that). Fracked gas is just another example of peak-fossil fuels. It is dirtier and just another excuse to keep burning stuff.
How come no one ever talks about how much gas is flared (burned) in oil fields and petroleum processing facilities all types, fracked or conventional? A significant quantity of CO2, methane, and aromatic hydrocarbons is released to the atmosphere and the “dumpers” seem to be getting a free ride. I can recall riding across parts of IL and IN many years ago at night and seeing fire after fire in the fields at the sites of the little wells that seemed to everywhere.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_flare