On his visit to Washington last week, Chinese president Xi Jinping announced that his country, the world's biggest carbon polluter, will launch a national cap-and-trade scheme in 2017. The move would make China the world's biggest carbon market and could strengthen global efforts to put a price on carbon.
The planned emissions trading program will consolidate China's seven existing regional carbon markets and cover industries not currently regulated for carbon in the United States: iron and steel, chemicals, building materials, and paper manufacturing.
China has yet to announce specifics of its cap-and-trade plan, which will face political and technical challenges. "The devil of course is in the details," said Timmons Roberts, a professor of environmental studies at Brown University. "It really does matter what the actual cap is." He added that limits leading to a pre-2030 emissions peak would be a huge move.
Frank Jotzo, the director of the Center for Climate Economics and Policy at the Australian National University in Canberra and a close tracker of developments in China said the national emissions trading scheme will have a major signaling effect. "The world's second-largest economy puts in place a price on carbon emissions, and this will be noted the world over," he said. "If successful, it can grow into playing a major role in facilitating China's objectives for a cleaner energy and industrial system."
Jinping's announcement occasioned this ironic observation in The Atlantic in reference to Republicans' rejection of a cap-and-trade proposal in Obama's first term, which led to enactment of climate control policy through regulation of the electric power industry in the form of the Clean Power Plan: "China, the largest self-avowedly communist nation in the world, has created a market to reduce its carbon emissions. And the U.S., the anchor of global capitalism, will limit them through government command-and-control."
China also made a substantial financial commitment to help poor countries fight climate change--$3.1 billion.
U.N. Sustainable Development Goals Adopted
The United Nations General Assembly agreed to 17 new sustainable development goals, which expand on the eight Millennium Development Goals. The new goals are broken down into 169 specific targets each country has committed to achieve over the next 15 years. They focus on everything from eradicating extreme poverty and climate change to providing energy access for all.
Goal 7 is to ensure access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all. Two targets to put the world on this path are to increase the share of renewable energy in the global energy mix and to double the rate of improvement of energy efficiency by 2030.
World Energy Council Secretary General Christoph Frei welcomed the agreement on the goals. "The adoption of energy among sustainable development goals is timely, critical, and historic," he said. "Timely because we need to master the energy transition at a time of greatest uncertainty in the energy sector. Critical because we will not solve energy access or achieve energy efficiency objectives without moving the agenda from those who want to those who can. Historic because the development community for the first time recognizes the fundamental role energy is playing in the achievement of most of the other sustainable development goals."
Goal 13 is to take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts. A few targets to get there--integrate climate change measure into national policies, strategies and planning as well as advance the Green Climate Fund--requiring developed countries to follow through on commitments to provide $100 billion by 2020 to aid developing nations' efforts to adapt and mitigate climate-related disasters.
With the adoption of the 17 goals, attention now turns to the U.N. climate negotiations in Paris--where member states hope to adopt a global climate agreement. In a CNN editorial, U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon, said all could take a lesson from Pope Francis's message on climate change.
"Pope Francis, in his recent encyclical, clearly articulated that climate change is a moral issue, and one of the principal challenges facing humanity," said Ban Ki-Moon, mentioning the Pope's recent visit to the U.S. where he address the U.N. and Congress. "He rightly cited the solid scientific consensus showing significant warming of the climate system, with the most global warming in recent decades mainly a result of human activity."
Shell Suspends Arctic Drilling
Royal Dutch Shell suspended its search for oil and gas off the coast of Alaska for the "foreseeable future," saying that Arctic oil reserves were insufficient and that the regulatory environment was too unpredictable to continue.
"Shell continues to see important exploration potential in the basin, and the area is likely to ultimately be of strategic importance to Alaska and the U.S.," said Marvin Odum, president of Shell USA. "However, this is a clearly disappointing exploration outcome for this part of the basin."
Although the decision was celebrated by some environmental activists who had protested Shell's decision to drill offshore, it should give people on both sides pause, Mike LeVine of Oceana told U.S. News and World Report.
"Meaningful action to address climate change is almost certainly going to mean we can't keep looking for oil in remote and expensive places," he said. "Rather than investing in programs like this, we need to figure out how to transition away from fossil fuels and toward sustainable energy."
Alaska House of Representatives member Ben Nageak told the Associated Press that the state must act quickly to find another source to fill its 800-mile trans-Alaska oil pipeline.
"We stood on the cusp of another economic boom that could have propelled our young people and their children to better futures," Nageak said. But "a draconian and poisoned federal government" shut it down.
The Climate Post offers a rundown of the week in climate and energy news. It is produced each Thursday by Duke University's Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions.