Copenhagen summit: Chinese regime’s carbon reduction bluff

Only an international socialist reorganisation of the economy can set China and the world on a low carbon path

Editorial from socialist magazine Shehui Zhuyi Zhe, issue four (Winter 2009-10)

The UN’s Copenhagen Summit (COP15) in December poses crucial issues for the future of our planet. The pace of global warming is accelerating – smashing through treaties like Kyoto and other attempts to limit greenhouse gases with the force of a dirty diesel-powered truck. Six years (until 2015), this is effectively all the time we have left to start major reductions in greenhouse emissions, before catastrophic increases in extreme weather, flooding, drought, falling agricultural production and mass migration, become unavoidable. As the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide (CO2), China’s role is central. But on its present course the Chinese regime is only aggravating the climate crisis.

Fresh evidence of the dangers emerges all the time. In November, New Zealand issued a shipping warning as a flotilla of more than 100 icebergs made their way past its coast. This rare event last happened in 2006, but before that not since 1931. The icebergs were part of a massive ice floe that split from Antarctica under the impact of rising sea and air temperatures.

Previously it was the rapid depletion of the ice at the North Pole that concerned the climatologists most. The Arctic will be ice free during summer time within a decade, according to a new report from the Catlin Arctic Survey Team that warns, “This could lead to flooding affecting one-quarter of the world’s population... and extreme global weather changes.” The IPCC (United Nations International Panel on Climate Change), whose research forms the main framework for the Copenhagen talks, had previously counted on such a scenario by the end of this century. This one example illustrates how the climate crisis is accelerating.

Scientists are now warning about an imminent climate “tipping point” at the opposite pole. The magazine Nature Geoscience warns that rising global temperatures could trigger a rapid disintegration of west Antarctica which holds enough frozen water to lift the global ocean watermark by about five metres. The IPCC estimates that a much smaller rise, of one meter, in sea levels would cost US$944 billion and threaten tens of millions of people in coastal areas and low-lying islands. According to all these scenarios, Asia comes out worst of all.

Shanghai, just three meters above sea level, is the Chinese city at greatest risk from rising ocean levels. A 30-centimeter increase by 2050, which is widely forecast, will lead to the flooding of about 54,000 square kilometers – more than half – of the Yangtze Delta Region, warns the World Wildlife Fund. Dhaka, capital of Bangladesh, Jakarta and Manila, are other massively populated Asian cities at high risk from rising ocean levels and other climate impacts. The number of people in developing countries affected every year by climate-related disasters has grown from fewer than 50 million between 1975-79 to more than 200 million between 2000-04.

“Climate change is about changes in water,” explained Nicholas Stern, the former World Bank chief economist. “The biggest impacts will be lack of it or too much of it.” While some regions will be submerged others will turn to desert. The proportion of very dry land worldwide has doubled since the 1970s. In 2009, northern China faced its worst drought in 50 years with massive crop losses across 15 provinces. But even Guangdong in the south experienced its most severe drought for 60 years, with water levels from August to September dropping to half of last year’s level. As temperatures rise, these problems amplify. Some experts predict that by 2025, no Chinese river will reach the sea except during floods. In addition to global warming, dams, irrigation and urbanisation place huge stress on freshwater resources and ecosystems. Globally, the extinction rate of freshwater species such as fish, frogs and turtles is “four to six times higher” than for land-based and marine species according to Diversitas, a group monitoring biodiversity. Every year an average of 20 lakes disappear in China and almost 90 percent of China’s lakes are in eutrophic state as a result of industrial pollution.

With the climate crisis the world – and especially the poor – also faces a food crisis as the population increases but land availability and agricultural productivity fall. This year, for the first time ever, the world has over 1 billion undernourished people, with 642 million of these in the Asia-Pacific region. Climate-related disasters such as this year’s drought in India and cyclones in the Philippines have crippled rice harvests sending world prices sharply upwards. Rice supplies worldwide are becoming tighter, threatening a repeat of 2008’s price hikes that caused food riots in many countries from the Middle East to the Caribbean.

This poses a major threat to China’s food security. A new report from McKinsey Climate Change, prepared with leading Chinese experts, warns that climate-driven water scarcity could reduce average crop yields by 12 percent in China’s northeast – a major wheat, corn and rice region – by the year 2030. A separate report from the WWF warns that rice production in the key Yangtze River basin, home to 400 million people and a third of national grain output, could fall by up to 40 percent in the coming century as a result of rising temperatures. The food crisis is yet another result of capitalism’s inability to plan and safeguard society’s resources. The diversion of around 100 million tonnes of cereal to produce biofuels is just one example of this.

Despite the increasing urgency in scientific reports, the world’s governments are preparing yet another disastrous fudge in Copenhagen. Leaders of 190 countries including Wen Jiabao and Barack Obama will meet to discuss a replacement for the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which runs out in 2012. No one seriously expects meaningful steps to be agreed in Copenhagen, let alone implemented. “It’s an absolute mess,” lamented the summit chief Yvo de Boer, commenting on the negotiation draft for the meeting. To salvage something the Danish Prime Minister and host, Lars Lokke Rasmussen, has called for a “political agreement”, knowing that a “binding agreement” that commits countries to make cuts is at this stage out of the question. A “Copenhagen 2” is being touted for the same reason. As Kevin Rafferty put it in the South China Morning Post: “The forlorn hope is that, like the World Trade Organisation’s Doha discussions, climate change talks will wander the world like a latter-day Flying Dutchman searching for political leaders who can understand the economic plight of the fragile planet Earth.”

But whichever leaders are in charge they will not find a solution as long as they remain wedded to capitalism. This is a system organised for the maximum exploitation of human and natural resources in order to make profit for a tiny few. It is a system that is destroying the planet. The US government has so far spent, lent, or committeed a cumulative US$12.8 trillion to rescue the Wall Street banks and their directors. But the UN Adaptation Fund, set up to help poor countries finance carbon reduction measures has scraped together just US$18 million. This is because contributions from rich nations have not materialised. The climate crisis cannot be solved without breaking the power of business empires based on oil, energy, and motor vehicles, and also ending the imperialist ‘Great Game’ whereby rival capitalist states fight to carve up and control continents and regions. Only the international working class, uniting other poor and oppressed layers behind it, can end today’s headlong rush to environmental disaster, by overthrowing capitalism and initiating a democratically planned, socialist makeover of the global economy.

On the road to Copenhagen, the major imperialist powers of the US, EU, Japan and China, have been honing their negotiating positions and can be expected to unveil further ‘offers’ even as the summit kicks off. Just ten days before the summit the Chinese regime pledged further cuts in carbon intensity by 40-45 percent by the year 2020, doubling its previous offer. But rather than genuine attempts to reach a global agreement for cutting emissions and shifting global production to renewable energy, each government’s position is driven by thinly-veiled national economic protectionism, the quest for additional leverage and prestige in the global debate, and the need to deflect blame for an inevitable failure.

Popular concern is rising everywhere as the scientific evidence becomes overwhelming. In Hong Kong, a November poll by HSBC Climate Confidence Monitor showed that 75 percent of citizens believe the climate crisis is at least as serious as the economic crisis. A poll bySynovate in August 2009, showed that 79 percent of people in Asian developing countries wanted their government to take action against climate change regardless of what other countries do. Given these concerns, no government or national capitalist class can afford to be cast as “climate villains”. Their main aim is to leave Copenhagen without taking the blame or picking up the bill!

The Chinese dictatorship’s pitch to the Copenhagen meeting shows it has learnt this game – it is every bit as nimble as Washington, Paris or Berlin, in presenting its own economic interests inside a ‘green’ wrapping. When Hu Jintao outlined the Chinese government’s proposals on carbon emissions before the UN General Council in September, this was portrayed by most of the world’s media as a breakthrough. The Guardian, an English newspaper, whooped that with this speech “the world inched closer to an elusive [climate] deal”. The Times proclaimed “China acts on carbon cuts”. These reporters must have been asleep when the president spoke. When Hu offered reductions by a “notable margin” (the phrase that generated such media excitement, although he mentioned no figures) he was talking about CO2 emissions per unit of GDP. The president’s speech was just a restatement of Beijing’s previous position, first outlined in 2006, that it will reduce carbon intensity (the amount of carbon by weight emitted per unit of GDP).

At that time the Chinese regime pledged to cut emissions per unit of GDP by 20 percent by the year 2020 from their 2005 level. Premier Wen Jiabao has since upped this offer to 40-45 percent to strengthen his hand in Copenhagen. The offer will “substantially bolster China’s green credentials” noted Tom Holland in the South China Morning Post (27 November), while he also pointed out this is only a target – the Chinese regime rejects any binding commitments, arguing that the Kyoto principle of excluding developing countries from binding emission cuts must remain under any new treaty. Yu Qingtai, China’s climate change ambassador, admitted that the new offer would not be “measurable, reportable and verifiable,” as demanded by foreign governments and environmental groups. We socialists stress the need to build democratic workers’ organisations in China and globally in order to monitor and control carbon emission cuts, rather than entrusting capitalist governments with this task. Neither is likely to happen at the Copenhagen talks. Therefore, as Tom Holland points out, “Beijing’s reduction pledge is merely a verbal agreement, and in the words of the old proverb: a verbal agreement isn’t worth the paper its written on.”

But should China achieve the new target of 40-45 percent cuts, where does this get us? It is not relative emission levels, but the total amount of greenhouse gases released into the earth’s atmosphere that matter in the context of global warming. IfChina continues to grow by around 8 percent annually over the next decade, the International Energy Agency (IEA) estimates that even with a 45 percent cut in carbon intensity its total carbon dioxide emissions will climb to double their 2005 level in 2020. This would be a deathblow for the prospects of limiting global emissions and averting a catastrophic rise in the earth’s median temperature of more than 2 degrees Celsius. As Holland shows, even if China’s average growth rate slows to 5 percent over the coming decade it will still be pumping out an additional 2 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide in 2020, outweighing all the reductions made by the US and Europe (assuming they hit their targets).

China was among the world’s 10 least efficient economies in terms of carbon intensity in 2005. Given this low starting point, its carbon intensity is already on track to fall by around 20 percent in 2020 based on a “natural” upgrading of the economy to more efficient fuels and a shift towards less energy-intensive service industries. In 2007 China’s carbon intensity (0.61kg of CO2 per US$ of GDP) was double the level in India (0.32kg), and three times higher than Indonesia (0.23kg) and Brazil (0.22kg), according to the IEA. One of the reasons for this is China’s excessive reliance on coal – the dirtiest fossil fuel and the cause of around 400,000 extra deaths annually in China – for over 70 percent of its energy.

China’s negotiators are absolutely right when they point out that it is rich countries, not the poor, that following decades of industrialisation are responsible for the majority of cumulative carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Now, hypocritically, governments and business leaders in these states (US, Europe, Japan and Australia) want to shift the cost of cutting carbon emissions onto the Chinese and Indian masses, as well as onto the working class in their own countries. China’s negotiators are also right to point to the refusal – in practise – of rich countries to transfer technologies and help finance the upgrading of industry in China and other poor countries. These are the realities of an unequal, imperialist world order. But the masses in so-called developing countries, while recognising and fighting against this inequality, cannot allow their own capitalists and governments to commit the same crimes – the climate crisis also demands radical and immediate transformative action in so-called developing countries.

While they are late-comers industrially, poor and middle-income countries now account for more than half of total carbon emissions worldwide. Brazil produces more CO2 per head than Germany, and China’s emissions per head are not far behind those of France. This is not an argument for keeping the Chinese masses in poverty, which is the logic of some capitalist commentators and green campaigners. It is an argument for revolutionary change in China and worldwide. Only through democratic socialist planning and control of the main economic levers will it be possible to make the shift to renewable energy and green technologies on the scale needed.

The size of China’s carbon footprint even on a per capita basis (above the global average) is largely due to coal. The headlong race towards mass car production and ownership – overtaking the US as the largest vehicle market in the world – is another important factor. The number of coal-burning electrical power plants doubled in China between 1996 and 2006. Coal remains central to the regime’s growth strategy – it plans to increase coal production by a further 30 percent by 2015. A crucial element in the battle against climate change therefore centres on the issue of how to wean the Chinese economy away from this “fatal attraction” to coal. The coal industry employs at least five million people in China, but others – in ports, railways, trucking and power generation – are also dependent on mining. Based on a system of democratic socialist planning and workers’ control and management, this switch could be achieved while at the same time providing alternative green jobs and industries for mining regions and other connected sectors.

The above article is translated from the new issue of Shehui Zhuyi Zhe, Chinese language socialist magazine. You can order a trial copy of the magazine from: cwi.china@gmail.com