The factory to the world says consumers, not poor countries, should pay to clean up the skies.
China has just laid out its negotiating position for the upcoming summit in Copenhagen, where diplomats will gather in December to try to hammer out an agreement on how to battle climate change.
The West is not going to like it. Essentially, China will argue that Western consumers buying Chinese-made goods should pay their fair share of the cost of cutting the pollution used to make the goods.
West and East have been arguing for years about who is to blame for climate change and how to cut down on the greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming. Broadly speaking, developed countries like the U.S. have looked with alarm at the fast increase of pollution in the East and insisted that nations like China and India must save the planet by acting quickly to curb pollution.
Developing nations have cried foul, arguing that cutting pollution levels would unacceptably slow down their economic development, keeping tens of millions of people mired in poverty. They argue that the West was allowed to pollute during its period of industrialization, and that they should be allowed to do the same. They say it would be unfair to penalize poor countries when richer Americans and Europeans consume far more energy than Asians do on a per-capita basis.
Because the U.S. and China are by far the world's biggest polluters--and China is expected to surpass the U.S. this year in carbon dioxide emissions--they are expected to be the drivers of debate in Copenhagen.
Raising the stakes in an already heated discussion, China has just taken the wheel with its new line that the consumers of end products are responsible for the pollution it took to produce them.
The consumer-pays model China is now pushing was detailed last week in Beijing at a forum between Chinese and Western economists.
Some of China's most prominent economists, Fan Gang, Su Ming and Cao Jing, had prepared a paper for the upcoming Copenhagen Climate talks and presented it at this small forum in advance of the global summit. It will likely change the debate at the Copenhagen talks, which are scheduled to start in less than 100 days.
Fan and his colleagues lay out a common-sense approach to determining responsibility for greenhouse gas emissions and use a complex formula based on accumulated emissions from 1950 to 2005 to quantify how much responsibility, in China's view, each nation should shoulder. Their reasoning? "The production is because of consumption, the supply is because of demand, the export is because someone wants to import," according to their August study, "The Low Carbon Development: China and the World." Fan is director of China's National Economic Research Institute.
Using their calculations, China's share of the burden is tiny, despite the fact that China will be the world's biggest polluter by year-end. The U.S. bears the biggest responsibility, with the 27-member European Union just behind the U.S.
India--a potential ally for China in the Copenhagen talks--bears none of the responsibility under China's calculations.
That should shift the debate in Copenhagen toward requiring Westerners to change their lifestyles or pay up for the pollution their spending generates.
Fan and his colleagues also lay out an approach that would give Western countries credit toward meeting their consumer-based burdens if they help clean up China. To this end, China advocates the transfer of green technology to its shores, particularly as it builds out infrastructure with billions from Beijing's economic stimulus plans. China's vision: If the West helps pay the tab, China could leapfrog ahead in pollution-reducing technology that would curb emissions down the road.
Fan's approach met some resistance from others attending the economists' gathering, which was hosted by the Brookings Institution and China's Economists 50 Committee, a group of practitioners from both the Chinese government and academia.
Wing Thye Woo, an economics professor at the University of California, Davis who is affiliated with the Brookings Institution, said that Fan's approach will make negotiations difficult. "The important issue is to reduce CO2 emissions, not who bears ultimate moral responsibility for it," Wing said. He argues that countries should impose a carbon tax on domestically produced goods, and a carbon tariff on imported goods. Such a measure would require consumers to pay more to buy pollution-heavy goods, but it would also give incentives to producers of the goods to keep prices down by using greener manufacturing methods.
The leader of the U.S. delegation at the talks, former Deputy Secretary of the Treasury and Deputy Secretary of State Kenneth Dam, said after hearing the Chinese presentation, "I'm very pessimistic on the outcome of the Copenhagen talks." He felt negotiators should take a pragmatic approach that allows for climate improvement, rather than holding out for a comprehensive deal. U.S. negotiators should only agree to what the U.S. Senate will accept, Dam said, to avoid torpedoing any agreement reached in Copenhagen.
One of the leaders of the "Summer Palace Dialogue" forum was Admiral Bill Owens, former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and current chairman of AEA Investors in Hong Kong, who argued that the U.S. and China should jointly create a fund with tens of billions of dollars that would be used to spark "green innovation." Using America's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency as a model--which funded military technology research and development, including the predecessor to the Internet--Chinese and U.S. scientists would share ideas and technologies developed by this green fund.
Writing in the current issue of
Foreign Affairs, Michael A. Levi said that to accomplish anything of note, Copenhagen negotiators should aim "to reinforce developed countries' emissions cuts and link developing countries' actions on climate change to objectives in other areas--such as economic growth, security and air quality--that leaders of those countries already care about." Levi, the David M. Rubenstein senior fellow for energy and the environment at the Council on Foreign Relations, warned that if "negotiators focus on fighting against various governments' most entrenched positions, they may leave the world with nothing at all."
While visiting research stations and greenhouse gas monitoring stations above the Arctic Circle on Tuesday, United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon preemptively urged negotiators at December's Copenhagen talks, which are the successor negotiations to the Kyoto Protocol, to reach some kind of agreement. "We must seal a deal in Copenhagen for a global, equitable and comprehensive deal for the future of humanity and the future of planet earth."
But is reaching that goal probable, or even possible? After all, the new consumer-pays proposal for fighting climate change came from China's capital, where pollution so often turns the blue sky gray.
Robyn Meredith is Hong Kong bureau chief for Forbes and the author of
The Elephant and the Dragon: The Rise of India and China and What it Means for All of Us. She writes a biweekly column.