If you’d asked us a few weeks ago, we might have said that China was charging ahead in wind and in solar photovoltaics, but was not a big player in the emerging technology of concentrating solar power. That has now changed dramatically. Last week U.S. company eSolar announced a $5 billion, 2 GW deal with Chinese company China Shandong Penglai Electric Power Equipment Manufacturing Co. If eSolar and partners succeed this will be the largest set of concentrating solar plants anywhere in the world.
In a new article in the Guardian, World Resources Institute President Jonathan Lash discusses the Copenhagen Accord and what it means for the future of international cooperation on climate change.
From the Guardian: Spin is the political language of Washington, but I have never encountered such conflicting currents of hype as those that have swirled around the globe since the gavel fell on the Copenhagen climate summit. Depending on whether you live in Beijing, Berlin or Boston the assessment ranges from catastrophe to success to somewhere in between. But what lies ahead?
On a lighter note, news is out that China’s enormous Bird Cage Olympic Stadium will host a free concert for peace and green right before Earth Day on April 17 this year. Organizers have not explained how they are financing a free concert or how the tickets will be distributed. As others have noted, big concert events like this have run aground in the past in China. Earth Day has been increasingly popular in China in recent years, with numerous conferences as well as public awareness events. Global Village Beijing launched its anti-plastic bag campaign on Earth Day a few years ago, and ultimately that effort resulted in Beijing’s ban on free shopping bags.
China seems finally to be emerging from a very cold spell, but not before struggling to cope with the increased energy demands associated with extreme cold. The Chinese press reported rationing of both gas and power in a number of Chinese cities and suggested the problems stemmed from coal shortages after the closure of 1000 coal mines in the past year for safety and environmental reasons.
The BASIC Countries (Brazil, China, India and South Africa) have set their next climate coordination meeting for January 24 in New Delhi, and that looks like just part of an environmental relations thaw between India and China, countries that still have territorial disputes dating from their 1962 border war. What better way to win friends than to increase tiger protection, especially right before China ushers in the Chinese zodiac Year of the Tiger, which would likely even increase the demand for the popular Traditional Chinese Medicinal use of tiger bone. The animals are hunted illegally in India and smuggled to China, and for many years Indian conservationists have asked China for help in combating the trade.
Since the Copenhagen Conference the Chinese government has engaged in international debate on the meeting’s meaning, but the external tumult does not appear to have affected its efforts to move forward on policies to reduce carbon intensity.
Your ChinaFAQs team has been in the swirling currents of the Copenhagen climate change negotiations for over a week, attending press conferences and listening in the corridors, but now the negotiators are running out of time. Before dawn today, the BBC World News led with the story that the sticking point in the negotiations is whether China will allow intrusive review of its progress on slowing the growth of greenhouse gas emissions. Of course, the media can’t resist a food fight, and all week the press has been filled with reports of verbal missiles supposedly being hurled by American and Chinese negotiators. We’ve also seen exaggerated portrayals of the supposedly-huge chasm separating the U.S. and China on questions like whether the U.S. will provide funds to China for clean technology and the extent of monitoring and review of China’s action.
Senior Chinese climate statesman He Jiankun, speaking at the Chinese Pavilion at the Copenhagen Climate Talks, announced that the Chinese carbon intensity would be introduced as legislation to be passed by China’s National People’s Congress, its highest law-making body.
Professor He, the Director of Tsinghua University’s Low Carbon Energy Laboratory and the University’s former Executive Vice President, spoke December 9 as part of a series of regular talks the Chinese are sponsoring in their first ever dedicated space at a major climate meeting.
Professor He emphasized that China’s commitment to making the 40-45% reduction in carbon intensity between 2005 and 2020 will be binding domestically, and that the government would also focus on implementing specific programs to meet it. He argued a carbon intensity goal is the best way to measure progress on climate change mitigation for a country in the midst of rapid industrialization and urbanization.
ChinaFAQs expert Angel Hsu is currently in Copenhagen following the Chinese negotiating team and is blogging about China at the conference on the Green Leap Forward.
About Angel Hsu:
Angel Hsu is a doctoral student at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. Her research focuses on Chinese environmental performance measurement, governance, and policy. Prior to coming to Yale, she was at the World Resources Institute (WRI), a non-profit environmental think tank in Washington, D.C., where she helped to develop corporate greenhouse gas reporting initiatives in developing countries and managed the GHG Protocol’s programs in China.
Covering fully one-third of primary energy use in China, the 1000 Enterprise Program set the goal of reducing energy consumption by 100 million tons coal equivalent by the end of 2010. In November, China’s National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) announced that the program had exceeded that goal two years early – by the end of 2008, the program had saved 106 million tons coal equivalent, resulting in avoiding 265 million metric tons of CO2 emissions.
