【0923 TCSM】China gets serious about carbon emissions, global warming

渔音谦谦

China gets serious about carbon emissions, global warming      
At UN, China's Hu Jintao commits to measurable limits on carbon emissions for the first time. Chinese environmental activists hail the shift toward low-carbon technology.      

Beijing - The pledge that Chinese President Hu Jintao made at Tuesday's United Nations climate change summit in New York – to put the   brakes on China's carbon dioxide emissions – may have been short on specifics.      
      Chinese environmentalists, though, are hailing it as an important sign that Beijing is now fully committed to the global crusade  against greenhouse gases.      
     TheChinese leader "signaled a willingness to move forward thenegotiations" on CO2 curbs that are due to culminate in Copenhagen,Denmark, in December, Greenpeace China's climate expert Yang Ailun saidhere Wednesday. "This is a step in the right direction."
      Mr. Hu promised that China would reduce its carbon intensity "by a notable margin by 2020 from 2005 levels." Carbon intensity is the amount of CO2 produced for each unit of economic output.      
      ThoughHu put no figure on the goal, this marked the first time that Beijinghas committed to measurable limits on its greenhouse-gas emissions. Asenior Chinese official said later that a firm target would beannounced "soon."
      "China is still waiting for developed countriesto put forward their own proposals for technology transfer andfinancial aid," which developing countries say they need in order tokeep building their economies with the least possible pollution,according to Alfred Deng, a policy analyst in Beijing with The ClimateGroup, an international climate-change watchdog.
      "China won't take the first step," Mr. Deng adds. "It will depend on how much developed countries do."
      World's largest CO2 producer
      Hu'spromise will not mean any cuts soon in the actual emissions from China,the world's largest CO2 producer. The country has too many cities,railroads, bridges, and ports still to build in its push to employmillions of Chinese and develop its economy – and these projectsrequire cement and steel from heavily polluting factories.
      But government policies to reduce China'sdependence on coal are already in place, and they need to be. "If thecurrent mode of economic development drags on, the scale of China'sfossil fuel consumption will be shocking," warned an influential reportissued earlier this month by 10 Chinese institutions.
      If energy consumption continued to grow at current rates until 2050, the report predicted, China would have burned more than 100 billion tons of coal by then, "far exceeding the load-bearing capacity of the whole planet."      
      IfChina invests heavily in renewable energy and receives generous aidfrom rich countries, its CO2 emissions could peak around 2035, said thereport, the most comprehensive study ever done into China's possiblelow-carbon development paths. They would not begin to fall until themiddle of the century.
      To download a PDF summary of the report in English, click here .
      Beijing takes global warming seriously
      Expertshere are generally confident that the Chinese government has recentlybegun to take the threat of global warming seriously, and to adoptpolicies to address it. Beijing has already said it would increaseenergy efficiency by 20 percent between 2005 and 2010 and use renewablesources for 15 percent of its energy by 2020.
      The government has set quotas and subsidies obliging utility companies to buy a certain proportion of their electricity from  wind, solar, and hydro projects.      
      China has also planted more trees for each of the past two years than the rest of the world put together, partly in a bid  to soak up CO2 in the atmosphere.      
      "Two years ago government officials would ask me why I was talking about a low-carbon future," recalls Yang Fuqiang, a climate  change expert with the Worldwide Fund for Nature. "They said it was a foreign idea.      
      "Todayofficials are clear that China has to move to a low-carbon economy,there is no question about it," Mr. Yang adds. Last month, for thefirst time, a decree from the National People's Congress, China'sparliament, used such concepts as a "low carbon economy" and a "greeneconomy," he points out.
      At the same time, a recent report from TheClimate Group found, "China has taken the lead in the race to developand commercialize a range of low carbon technologies."
      "Investors here are not short of money," says Yang. "If the government sets targets and issues mandatory requirements, investor will move. The government just has to give clear signals."



原文地址：http://www.csmonitor.com/2009/0923/p06s05-woap.html