New climate promises from the U.S. and China

What happened

Laying the groundwork for an upcoming climate summit in Copenhagen, the leaders of the world’s two largest greenhouse gas emitters pledged this week to cut emissions to help the world slow the pace of global warming. But neither President Obama nor President Hu Jintao of China made any specific, numerical commitments, or explained how they’d reduce emissions. Obama told other world leaders at a special U.N. conference on climate change in New York that the U.S. had entered a “new era” in confronting global warming, but with controversial cap-and-trade climate legislation on hold in the Senate, he kept his rhetoric vague. Hu announced that China would reduce the amount of carbon produced per unit of economic output by “a notable margin” over the next decade. Given China’s rapid growth, that approach means that its total emissions will rise even if its carbon intensity declines. Together, U.S. and China produce 40 percent of the world’s greenhouse gases.

The speeches offered a preview of the Copenhagen Summit in December, where negotiators hope to forge a successor to the Kyoto Protocol, the 1997 global warming accord that neither China nor the U.S. supported. Negotiating a new, more restrictive agreement will be complicated by strong resistance to hard targets—and by the leveling off of global temperatures over the past decade. Global temperatures rose rapidly in the 1990s, but since 1999, the average temperature of the globe has risen only 0.13 degree Fahrenheit. Most climate scientists say that’s the result of cyclical variations in ocean conditions, but critics say the lack of solid evidence of global warming makes it unnecessary to take any immediate and costly steps. “I think it supports the argument of those who’ve said, ‘What’s the rush for policy on this issue?’” said Patrick J. Michaels, a climatologist affiliated with the conservative Cato Institute.

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What the editorials said

“For years, China and the United States have engaged in a dangerous Alphonse-and-Gaston routine, using each other’s inaction to shirk their responsibility” to curb emissions, said The New York Times. Neither Obama nor Hu made “real and verifiable commitments” at the U.N. But at least they acknowledged the “global threat.” That, sadly, counts as “progress.”

Actually, Hu’s remarks were truly significant, said the Financial Times. His offer to curb carbon intensity represents China’s “first contribution as a great power constructively engaging with the world’s big problems.” China has signaled its willingness to agree to “a tough and binding” target on intensity, in exchange for the developed nations’ commitments to reduce their emissions by a significant amount.

What the columnists said

In his speech, Obama sought to create the impression that legislation to cap emissions was moving through Congress, said Christopher Beam in Slate.com. But that’s “not what’s happening.” While the House has passed a cap-and-trade bill to curb emissions, the Senate is bogged down in health reform. And passing that may look easy compared with striking a deal on climate legislation that pleases senators from “oil-happy Louisiana” and “coal-friendly Indiana.”

Politics is only half the battle, said Amy Myers Jaffe in Economist.com: Even if we had the political will to cut emissions, how would we accomplish it? To replace the global energy produced today by fossil fuels, we would need to build 6,020 new nuclear plants across the globe, or to produce 133 times the combined solar, wind, and geothermal energy currently harvested. Barring such a “monumental” transformation, we’re stuck with oil—or with “walking.”

There’s a third option, said Bjorn Lomborg in Forbes.com. We should immediately begin research and development on new climate-engineering technologies like “marine cloud whitening,” in which boats “spray seawater droplets into clouds above the sea to make them reflect more sunlight back into space.” Such a “stopgap measure” could potentially “buy us a century’s delay in global warming.” That would spare us the many trillions needed to reduce emissions dramatically, while giving us enough time to develop new energy sources. We can act quickly to arrest climate change—but we needn’t act stupidly.