21 - Emissions Trading: A Fantasy for China to Combat Global Warming?

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Since the early 1990s, China has actively been involved in the international effort to address climate change. It has ratified the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the Kyoto Protocol, and focused on how to integrate climate issue with development objectives. Although historically China accounted for only a relatively low percentage (7.3 percent from 1850 to 2000) of globally cumulative greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, it has increased its share in the last decade to 14.8 percent in 2003. China is, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the second largest emitter in absolute terms, where GDP and population are decisive determinants.

In sharp contrast with these enormous overall amounts, China's GHG emissions, in per capita terms, depicts a different picture. China only ranks ninety-seventh globally, just slightly higher than the average of developing countries. China could argue that these figures might be deceptive because the cross-country difference in rank may be large but the absolute difference may be rather small, if one compares the U.S. 6.6 tons carbon equivalent per capita to the 1.1 tons of China.

There is also another indicator that China uses to defend itself when asked during international negotiations to take some sort of responsibility to curtail GHG emissions and that is carbon intensity, which is the level of CO₂ emissions per unit of economic output.