Was China really to blame for the collapse of the Copenhagen summit? Glyn Ford investigates
The United States and Europe have blamed China for the failure of the Copenhagen climate talks. Yet the process was badly mismanaged by the West and compounded by a failure to understand Beijing’s concerns. China was backed into a corner with no way out save by losing face, with Barack Obama shaming China as the guilty party in advance of the final collapse of the talks.
Certainly, many in the US – outside of the White House – will be celebrating Washington’s serendipity in finding a last-minute “get out of fail free” card. What many in Congress wanted – no binding agreement to threaten obese levels of US consumption – was achieved while offloading the blame onto an economy where 300 million people are still trying to scramble out of deep poverty. It’s an economy where, in a year, those 300 million people earn less than the US spends on pet food.
While it is vital to achieve a global agreement on the sharp reduction of the production of greenhouse gases, this will only happen when we have grasped where China and the rest of the group of emerging industrial nations are coming from. This means we need to look at the potential winners and losers of global warning and who is being asked or made to pick up the bill. China, uniquely among these nations, is a comparative winner. At the same time, it is being asked as part of this group to pay a disproportionately high share of the costs. In the absence of good will, this is a guaranteed recipe for resistance.
Global warming is bad for the planet, but it is not equally bad for everyone. Arctic ice melting stands to benefit Canada and Russia, as their vast inaccessible permafrost hinterlands transform into new sources of mineral and – perhaps – agricultural wealth.
Canada is the size of Europe with a twentieth of the population and 15,000 polar bears. Meanwhile, the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) will give 50 per cent of the Arctic’s mineral resources to Russia.
UNCLOS rules will carve up the new continental shelf that climate change is literally opening up for exploitation. So it is no surprise that neither Russia nor Canada led the charge at Copenhagen. This helps to explain the rumours that Moscow was responsible for hacking into and exposing the unfortunate emails from Sussex University which cast doubt on the integrity of climate change scientists. And it explains the sudden interest of the US Senate in finally ratifying UNCLOS. Hitherto, UNCLOS has been another unilateral US holdout.
After Russia and Canada, the other big winner is China.
The disappearance of Arctic pack ice will open up the north-west passage across the top of Canada and the northern passage across the top of Russia to the great benefit of those two countries.
In 1996, the eight Arctic states (Canada, Russia, the US and the five Scandinavian nations) established the Arctic Council to promote co-operation and co-ordination on the issues that affected them. The disappearance of the pack ice will bring China closer to the US and Europe and redraw the map of the world’s trade routes. It is no accident that last year China and South Korea applied for observer status at the Arctic Council or that Chinese ships have recently been up exploring in the Artic.
The shortest polar route shrinks the distance between Asia and Europe by 40 per cent. Even transit shipping via the north-west passage makes Yokohama more than 3,000 kilometres closer. The northern passage over Russian puts Shanghai 6,500 kilometres closer and even Singapore 2,000 kilometres nearer.
The consequences for China and its near neighbours are enormous in reducing transport costs for industrial and agricultural products and improving their comparative advantage. This meteorological revolution will have the same level of impact as the technology of the steamship and railway did in the 19th century when their simultaneous arrival made US grain cheaper than domestic production in Europe and arguably unleashed a set of consequences that led to the imperial wars of a century ago.
This time around, Chinese apples will end up cheaper in New York than West Coast apples. The volume of shipping through the Panama Canal will drop sharply. If that will be bad for the US, it will be worse for Africa, which runs the risk of becoming a forgotten continent, except for its mineral wealth. The Suez Canal will lose the majority of its trade and Egypt its second largest source of foreign income.
Thus for China, Russia and Canada, climate change is not entirely negative. So China sees itself as disadvantaged and discriminated against in terms of the proposals of how to cut greenhouse gas emissions.
Europe, the United States and – to an extent – Japan are post-industrial economies. Their growth is no longer driven by the old sinews of the industrial revolution: coal, steel and cement – the smokestack industries of the past. Instead it is driven by information technology and the new intangibles – for example, the virtual worlds of financial speculation and global gaming, whether film, anime, gambling or sport. Thus their pain of compliance to achieve cuts in carbon emissions would be dulled compared to China’s manufacturing economy, if its double-digit growth rates are pegged back to those of nearly two decades ago.
Further, tackling global warming will require sacrifices to be made in terms of living standards. Energy efficient light bulbs and green recycling are not going to do more than scratch the surface of the global problem. Per head of the population, the US, Europe and Japan are by far the greater part of the problem. Each American has the carbon footprint of up to a dozen Chinese peasants. Yet the only measure of control is production and not consumption. However, the products manufactured in China that require the employment of millions of its people are consumed in the West.
Why is there no factor in the calculation to measure consumption? Without this, any binding agreement threatens to have China’s poor carrying America’s middle class on their backs, as they struggle to haul themselves out of grinding poverty.
Next time around, Europe and Japan – which both have strong commitments to cut carbon emissions, particularly the new Japanese government of Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama – must insist that President Obama puts together proposals that reflects China’s concerns. Such concerns would be shared by India and Brazil. And the US must outline its case in a way that doesn’t portray Beijing – which is prepared to be a willing victim, to a degree – as the villain.
At present, the problem is not Beijing. It’s Washington.
Glyn Ford is a former Labour MEP
