Breakthrough

The Bali global warming talks ended in nothing, but that didn't stop European leaders from pointing to the bright side: the U.S. was booed.

Here's Wash Post:

"As we saw in the room today, the political price for blocking things has come up in recent months," said Connie Hedegaard, the Danish climate and energy minister, whose government will host the 2009 treaty talks.

Hedegaard was referring to boos the U.S. representative got after rejecting emissions reductions goals and timetables.

But having diplomats boo each other would seem to indicate a new nadir, not a new peak, in climate negotiations. (At least WWF's climate head was honest, acknowledging that, "in the process, we lost substance.")

The truth is that those countries that ratified Kyoto haven't any more reduced their emissions than the U.S. Those countries that have did so for reasons other than global warming (coal miner's strike in the UK and collapse of East Germany industry after reunification). EU leaders will try to show a decline in total emissions by counting those emissions that Russia would have brought on line had its economy not tanked after the fall of Communism.

Ham-handed statistical manipulations aside, the whole post-Kyoto conversation is moot without China. Roger Pielke just posted some fascinating China numbers comparing the expected increase in China's emissions to developed nations. Here's Pielke's run-up:

The growth in China's emissions from 2006-2010 is equivalent to adding the 2004 emissions of Japan, Germany, United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia to China's 2006 total (source). The emissions growth in China at these rates is like adding another Germany every year, or a UK and Australia together, to global emissions. The graph below illustrates the point.

And now for the graph -- hold on to your hat.

(GtC = gigatons of carbon)

None of this is to "blame China." Just the opposite: it's to show why Kyoto is irrelevant in the context of the emissions China will bring on line. Here's the Times' Andy Revkin on why the developing world matters in the context of climate change:

Richard Richels, an economist at the Electric Power Research Institute, helped produce an ominous forecast: even if the established industrial powers turned off every power plant and car right now, unless there are changes in policy in poorer countries the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere could still reach 450 parts per million -- a level deemed unacceptably dangerous by many scientists -- by 2070. (If no one does anything, that threshold is reached in 2040.)

Kyoto doesn't count as a country's emissions all of the stuff that we rich countries buy from China. China's emissions are skyrocketing in part because they are manufacturing like crazy in plants fueled by coal. Think about how much stuff we Americans own that is made in China. The emissions China generates manufacturing our stuff are as much ours as China's.

The two decade-old game of the U.S. blaming China and China the U.S. on climate change is a result of political leaders on both sides being unable to see the obvious best framework to accelerate the transition to clean energy: massive shared investments to buy down the price of clean energy sources like solar. If the U.S. and Europe each put $500 billion on the table over a decade to invest in various things -- from wind and solar to carbon capture, efficiency, and conservation -- you could likely attract some sort of an agreement from China to price carbon. China would stand to win a great deal of the clean energy manufacturing jobs, including most if not all solar panel production.

Kyoto has always had two big things wrong. First, it insisted on a global agreement when what's needed is one between a small number of large countries that will drive the clean energy technology through the global economy. This is the case that Oxford's Rayner and LSE's Prins brilliantly make in their famous "The Wrong Trousers" critique of Kyoto.

Second, Kyoto starts with regulation when it should have started with investment. Kyoto only works if it makes dirty energy expensive to make clean energy cost competitive and stimulate conservation and efficiency. Kyoto tries to get to investment through its Clean Development Fund. But it depends on the success of regulation.

A new, post-Kyoto agreement would focus resolutely on making clean energy cheaper than coal in China. And it would begin with investment -- $1 trillion or so on the table -- and end with agreements on regulation, perhaps even a multinational carbon tax, enforced through the WTO, which would be far easier to enforce than global cap and trade.

Happily, this agreement could be negotiated, and demanded, no matter what happens to the Kyoto protocol, which has not worked because it cannot work. Indeed, American scientists already are calling for something similar, at least in the U.S. Here's Revkin again:

Theories abound over how best to help China embrace emissions-reducing policies. One way, many scientists and scholars say, is to make nonpolluting energy sources cheaper than the unfettered burning of abundant fossil fuels. Right now they are far more expensive.

That is why several dozen top-flight climate and energy experts sent a letter this month to members of Congress and the presidential candidates seeking a tenfold rise in the federal budget for energy research, now about $3 billion a year. . . [Stanford researcher BinBin Jiang said,] "The U.S. is not going to be influential by telling China what to do. It has to lead by example."