Two cents (0.136 RMB) on China + some analysis

While negotiations seemed deadlocked earlier today, measures taken this afternoon may have revived hopes for an agreement in Copenhagen.

Two of the major stumbling blocks to reaching an agreement at COP15 have been the positions of the United States and China. The general feeling from both developing countries and our European friends (see here and here) is that the U.S. offer to reduce emissions is underwhelming. (The U.S. proposes reducing its GHG emissions 17% below 2005 levels by 2020, equivalent to reducing 3-4% below 1990 levels). American suggestions of $10 billion in funding to developing countries through 2012 have also been criticized as inadequate.

Conversely, the refusal of the Chinese to accept MRV requirements -- measuring, reporting, and verification -- claiming that it violates national sovereignty, is a major sticking point with the Americans. It’s been cleverly couched by the Chinese as, We aren't taking [getting?] your funding. And since you aren’t paying for any of these projects, no MRV. Or as Wen Jiabao said on Thursday:

"For developing countries, only those mitigation actions supported internationally will be subject to the MRV." Any "voluntary mitigation actions [that China takes on by itself] should not be subject to international MRV.”

China has indicated that its 2020 carbon intensity goal counts as a voluntary action at the international level, though it will be legally required at the domestic level. These points of contention have held up negotiations for several days, with a pretty pessimistic outlook this morning.

However, by late this afternoon, things just might have shifted. At an event in the evening put on by the BlueGreen Alliance (a uniting of workers and environmental groups to further the agenda for "good jobs, clean environment, green economy"), I ran into Barbara Finamore, the head of NRDC’s China program, who has decades of experience working in the country and who has contacts well-positioned to know how the Chinese delegation operates at international negotiations. (See her quote in the New York Times on December 15. By the way, for transparency's sake, I should note she was my boss when I worked in NRDC's Beijing office in 2007.)

Barbara felt that Secretary of State Clinton’s announcement -- that the U.S. will help raise funding of $100 billion for developing countries to deal with climate change -- could break the logjam. Since the U.S. has made a move, it is now up to China, which has been asking for more concrete steps from the Americans all along, to reciprocate.

According to Clinton (transcript of speech and related article):

"the United States is prepared to work with other countries toward a goal of jointly mobilizing 100 billion dollars a year by 2020 to address the climate change needs” of developing nations.

However, this must be done "in the context of a strong accord in which all major economies stand behind meaningful mitigation actions and provide full transparency as to their implementation.''

In other words, this effort to mobilize funding ("from a wide variety of sources, public and private, bilateral and multilateral, including alternative sources of finance") will commence only if (1) a deal is reached, and (2) the deal must include measures that ensure "transparency" and the ability to conduct MRV. The funding will have a "significant focus on forestry and adaptation" and is "particularly ... for the poorest and most vulnerable" countries.

Several members of the G77 have already sent messages to the Chinese indicating that they are amenable to this plan because they truly need and want the funding, and have asked the Chinese to make a deal possible. (This group includes the Maldives, Ethiopia and Bangladesh. See here.) This is not to say all G77 countries are convinced. Lumumba di-Aping of Sudan, who acts as chief negotiator of the G77, said, "This is a good signal, but it's still insufficient. We need more money." (Quoted here.)

On the Chinese side, some leaders are worried that that MRV could mean intrusive actions, such as factory-level inspections, with foreign experts entering individual facilities to ascertain whether China is living up to its carbon intensity goals. They feel this is a major affront to sovereignty. Beijing says that it will make its efforts transparent, and compliant with national laws and regulations, and this should be good enough. Or as He Yafei, vice-foreign minister, put it, China’s laws would guarantee compliance. (Mentioned in NYTimes article from December 15. Ugh, don't get me started on how this seems preposterous.)

Finamore and others have been attempting to convince parties on both sides that intrusive inspections of this sort are not what MRV is about, and such drastic measures are, in fact, not needed to verify that the Chinese are meeting their commitments. For one, China publishes data about its electricity generation, fuel use and energy use every year. The data are publicly available, and other international institutions (including multilateral lending institutions like the Asian Development Bank) make full use of it.

If the Chinese can continue working toward transparency and publicizing their actions, there is enough information in these and other reports to track progress in emissions reductions. The Chinese can feel that respect for their sovereignty is upheld, while the Americans (the Senate in particular) can be confident that the Chinese are not only taking on some of the global burden, but that the international community can verify progress.

Some of you will ask, How do we know China will actually publish accurate statistics? What if officials fudge the numbers?

For example, in the last Five-year Plan that runs through 2010, there was an energy intensity target, which would work much the same way this new carbon intensity target is supposed to work. Provincial leaders are evaluated in part based on whether they meet this target or not. Don’t they have an incentive to lie?

While there are many examples of this problem in China, and it remains an ongoing concern, there are also several factors that can mitigate the problem, at least when it comes to energy and GHG emissions reporting:

1. The Chinese government needs these statistics, too. As Lily Cheng pointed out, Beijing wants accurate data to work with.

2. A revision to the Statistics Law (more details here) was passed this year and comes into effect in January 2010. It imposes severe penalties (potentially even jail time) for leaders that fake or alter statistics. This should be a big deterrent.

3. Increasing energy efficiency and reducing emissions are things many local leaders want to do voluntarily. According to Finamore, mayors and other officials understand that these measures make enterprises more competitive and that it saves them money.

So the incentives line up in a way that should make energy statistics more believable and accurate. China, of course, can continue to make its domestic situation more transparent and potentially allow more independent auditing. But the measures wouldn’t have to be as intrusive as people think.

Neither the U.S. or China is likely to make a move that makes it look like it is capitulating on key matters -- but the gap between the two sides has begun to close, and thus, Finamore says “the door is open” for some form of an agreement.

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Additional points:

1. This situation could potentially further fracture the unity of the G77 + China grouping. As noted above, Bangladesh, the Maldives and Ethiopia, among others, have contacted the Chinese to express their support for an agreement in the wake of this announcement. Furthermore, in a televised debate, the president of the Maldives, Mohamed Nasheed, even criticized the idea being floated by some of the G77 and China that "no deal is better than making a bad deal." According to The Australian, Nasheed said that "we are in the G77 and we want an agreement from Copenhagen. We do not agree with that viewpoint at all [that failing to make a deal would be better than a bad deal]. We have to have an agreement."

On the other side, in addition to Sudan/G77 head Lumumba di-Aping's intonation for "more money," Brazil has also raised concerns about "intrusive verification," while Ecuador's foreign minister noted that “What we really need are firm mechanisms to reduce emissions from industrialized countries. Financial mechanisms are useful, but not central, not a solution.” (Quoted in the New York Times).

This kind of split is probably not something China wants to preside over. It also wants to avoid the even worse position of being seen as the cause of failure at COP15. This all adds up to more impetus for the Chinese to respond. Since Chinese premier Wen Jiabao arrived on Wednesday, he has met with Brazil, Bangladesh, Trinidad, Ethiopia and Sudan. The U.S. in turn, has been meeting with India (among other G77 members) and may be reaching an agreement. Jairam Ramesh, India's minister of the environment and forestry says that the two countries agree on about "75% of things", and the last 25% is on ... you guessed it, MRV.

2. See this piece about the varying interpretations of when MRV can/should be applied to projects that countries undertake. US says all actions to reduce emissions by developing countries should be subject to MRV. Many developing nations say that only projects that get outside funding should have MRV requirements. This conflict dates back to the Bali Action Plan, and much of the debate centers around the placement of a comma in the text (!), which took delegates more than two hours to discuss. (!!!)

3. If worse comes to worse, another NRDC expert said that a bilateral statement by the US and China to jointly combat climate change might be the next best option. Let's hope it doesn't come to that.

4. Associated Press has a good article on the implications of the U.S. offer on aid.

5. Check out Barbara Finamore's blog at NRDC's website with commentary on Copenhagen, as well as China's environment and its energy situation.

Reducing Emissions: An evening with the “numbers”

The life of a diplomat can be tough. It’s not all glitz and glamour—and you don’t always get to stand up at the podium making grand pronouncements of principle.




Shortly after 9 p.m. tonight, a contact group of the AWG-KP—that’s Ad Hoc Working Group on Further Commitments for Annex I Parties under the Kyoto Protocol—gathered in the Hans Christian Andersen meeting room. (As Prof. Schneider explained it, a contact group is formed when there’s a sticking point during the plenary, the main negotiating sessions, a particular issue that needs to be hashed out or clarified. Then all the interested countries dispatch representatives to work on crafting an understanding on that point, while the rest of the plenary moves on and discusses other issues on the agenda.)

In our case, the representatives were there to discuss the emissions reductions that each country in Annex I of the Kyoto Protocol would be willing to commit to, and then determine what those emissions reductions would add up to in aggregate.

Sounds like a sexy topic, right? You’d expect fireworks and grand-standing and denunciations as the debate heated up over who should commit and why and how much. Well, the session wasn’t the verbal sparring match we anticipated. For a couple of hours, we mostly stared at a projection of a table:

The two columns read:

• Quantified emissions limitation or reduction commitment (2008-2012) (percentage of base year)
  
• Quantified emission limitation or reduction commitment ([2013-2017][2013-2020]) percentage of base year or period

The brackets indicate that content inside the [ ] is up for discussion. The contact group got underway, with various delegations making statements under the Powerpoint glow.

There was some discussion of inserting text: adding footnotes and qualifications; noting this issue or quibbling with that formulation; clarifications or caveats on how emissions reductions are supposed to work. I’m going to make up a phrase here—something like “temporary conditionalities and self-referencing anomalies” seemed to rule the day. Other delegations would object or want to further discuss what was being added to the document. It wasn’t long before the whole conference room turned to gentle droning, and observers and delegates alike started to drift.

At some point, members of the contact group realized that not much was getting done, because the key question of “how much” each country should commit to was still not answered.

Micronesia: It might be best to leave this. We are straying quite far from where we hope to be. (Editor's note: She sounds like Vienna Teng … lyrical, musical voice) (Muzicon)

Chinese delegate: I doubt whether we are making progress and question if we should be here at this late hour, if all we are doing is repeating these old lines (Muzicon)

Since the discussion did not seem to be getting anywhere, the chair suggested that meeting in a “smaller group” as opposed to the wider “contact group” to try to work through some of the issues. She then fielded responses to this proposal. The session then spent the next hour discussing how to proceed (as opposed to the substance of the agenda.)

The process of diplomacy is sometimes … well, I’d venture *often* ... like this. It seems a hard to be a diplomat, especially when you’re dealing with minute details that will wear down your teeth. (Or in this case, deciding what exact procedure would be appropriate for you to begin wearing down your teeth).

My friend Eric Yang Yi pointed out that this kind of working session is very much like 苦功 hard work, hard labor. The participants basically sit there, and go line by line, nitpicking the text, the exact phrasing of each line, mostly contesting the particular language in the document, though in some cases also raising points of principle, Phrasing probably has legal and political rammifications, which is why they do it, and it's important work. (However, it seemed like a lot of these caveats and clarifications imported long-standing arguments to the discussion, which is why some delegates felt like things were moving backwards). The verb Eric used in Chinese to describe the process is 磨, meaning "to grind." It’s exactly like that: a wheelstone grinding against rocks, until the final product is polished—or at least in close enough shape to pass back to the larger plenary.

In fact, when we left, the contact group was still going, though delegates were visibly wilting, and some were showing their frustration. Cearly, they were very dedicated people, and as the Chinese delegation put it: "We're willing to stay here all night, if we are making progress toward an agreement." But many of them felt that they were simply spinning wheels without getting "the numbers" down.

I would have stayed longer to catch the end of the tale, but I didn't want to miss the last Metro out of Bella Center. I was afraid there wouldn’t be any trains after midnight.

(This entry is an impression of the proceedings of an AG-KWP contact group that took place on the evening of December 14, 2009 at the Fifteenth Conference of the Parties in Copenhagen, Denmark. While descriptions are faithful to what was observed from 9-11:50 p.m. from a particular individual's vantage point, the author makes no claims of its accuracy as a reflection of the COP process or of AG-KWP contact groups in general. The author takes no responsibility for the reaction of readers or their actions subsequent to reading this blog.)

Eric surreptiously having his photo taken with Yu Qingtai, one of the Chinese negotiators.

The Belarussian delegate checks her e-mail while the contact group softly hums in the background.