Stephen Chen – Updated on Apr 16, 2008
Leading greenhouse gas emitters will meet in Paris tomorrow to work out ways to tackle global warming, with the mainland expected to face unprecedented pressure to take the initiative.
The two-day meeting will be chaired by the US and preceded by a workshop today on greenhouse gas targets for industrial sectors.
The meeting is part of a drive for an agreement by the end of this year by countries that emit 80 per cent of the world’s greenhouse gases.
The Paris gathering is the third since US President George W. Bush initiated talks last year with major emitters, including the mainland, India and the European Union.
For China, battered by the Tibetan riots and a protest-riddled Olympic torch relay, the meeting would be like The Banquet, environmental observer Li Feng suggested, referring to a mainland movie involving a political setup.
Last month, economists at the University of California, Berkeley, and UC San Diego released a study on China’s carbon emissions with figures that put all previous estimates – including those by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – in the shade.
The researchers’ most conservative forecast said that by 2010, the annual carbon emissions in China would be 600 million tonnes higher than they were in 2000.
Given that developed countries have pledged only 116 million tonnes of carbon emissions cuts under the Kyoto Protocol, the growth from China would dramatically overshadow the world’s effort to tame global warming, the scientists said.
“Making China and other developing countries an integral part of any future climate agreement is now even more important,” Maximillian Auffhammer, UC Berkeley assistant professor of agricultural and resource economics, said in an earlier press release.
“It had been expected that the efficiency of China’s power generation would continue to improve as per capita income increased, slowing down the rate of carbon dioxide emissions growth.
“What we’re finding instead is that the emissions growth rate is surpassing our worst expectations.”
On Monday, the new Ministry of Environmental Protection – the elevated State Environmental Protection Administration – released the first batch of orders to control the emission of greenhouse gases, making China the first country in the world to issue compulsory standards on greenhouse emissions.