China the trump card in a climate change deck gambling on 2ºC

EVERlarger and more frequent weather disasters around the world are fuelling pessimism that we can curb man-made climate change before its too late.

But Laurence Tubiana is more optimistic than apocalyptic. She believes mankind is finally getting the message about the damage it is inflicting on the planet. And is at last starting to do something serious about it.

But then she admits that she has to be sanguine because she is France’s special representative and chief negotiator for the crucial climate change conference – COP 21 – which is to be held in Paris in December.

Tubiana – who is also professor and director of the Sustainable Development Centre at Sciences Po Paris and professor of international affairs at Columbia University – visited South Africa recently to talk to local climate change officials.

COP 21 – the 21st yearly session of the Conference of the Parties to the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) – is going to be a jamboree with about 40 000 people attending, including UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon and Pope Francis – who has just delivered an encyclical on climate change.

This is where the allembracing global agreement to counter global warming which was dimly envisaged in Durban at COP 17 in 2011 is supposed to be spelt out and adopted. Which she thinks it will be. However, she is not certain it will be enough to keep the rise in the average global temperature to under 2ºC above pre-industrial levels. That is the target which the international community has set to prevent global warming becoming catastrophic.

“The window of opportunity is now much narrower. It’s still feasible, but it implies that in particular global (greenhouse gas) emissions will have to peak earlier than at the moment is anticipated.

“The emissions of the developed countries have peaked already so they are decreasing.

“So everything depends on China,” because it is emitting so much, she says. “For the moment, China has given the signal that it will peak at or around 2030. That would mean we cannot do the 2ºC.

“Of course, everyone believes that China could peak much earlier.” But Beijing doesn’t want to say it now. And may not say it even in Paris.

That’s because Beijing’s overriding political priority is maintaining a high economic growth rate. If it announced that carbon emissions would peak in, say 2025, rather than 2030, that would imply a lower growth rate than the 7 or 8 percent currently projected – and expected by its people.

Tubiana said Beijing was caught in a dilemma between this high growth imperative and its “serious concern about climate change” – greater than South Africa’s, for instance. It was seeing the effects in floods, desertification and air pollution so toxic that people sometimes struggled to breathe.

“It happens that the sea level rise happens faster in China than in some other regions. So they are concerned because all their development is coastal, basically, even if they try to develop more than the West.”

If China peaked earlier, in 2025, that would enable other countries to do more, partly because this would mean that China had increased its investment in renewable energy, which was already enormous and that could be used by all.

So China is keeping everyone guessing. Probably deliberately. Fergus Green and Nicholas Stern, of the London School of Economics, recently predicted that China’s carbon emissions would indeed peak in 2025, but that Beijing was playing down expectations so it could exceed them.

Tubiana said the big COP 15 climate change conference in Copenhagen in 2009 had failed because the big emerging nations like China, India and Brazil were not yet ready to tackle climate change. Since then there had been a ”striking” change in their attitudes.

Beijing, especially, began to tackle climate change seriously, investing heavily in renewable energy such as solar and wind, and now even preparing to launch its own carbon market next year.

India had recently announced that by 2025 it would be producing 175 gigawatts (GW) of renewable energy, 100GW from solar and 75GW from wind. Others had done likewise.

From almost no policies on global warming before Copenhagen in major emerging economies, most now had them.

The developed nations had also moved rapidly since then. Denmark had invested heavily in wind and was now a world leader, exporting windmills all over the world.

Germany has made renewables a part of its industrial strategy, partly by putting a very high price of about 100 a ton on carbon emissions.

“California is doing stunning things in renewables; it has made that one of the pillars of its economic strategy. It’s inserting renewable energy into the grid without storage at a rate we in France thought impossible.” Japan was also doing a lot. All these investments in renewables since Copenhagen had brought prices right down. The cost of solar panels had decreased in Spain by almost 90 percent since Copenhagen.

In rough average terms, electricity from solar energy now costs about 80 a megawatt hour, about the same as “new nuclear”, meaning electricity from nuclear reactors with advanced safety features, she said.

However, in sunny southern France and in Chile, for example, solar energy-powered electricity prices have dropped to about 55 or 60 a megawatt hour, approaching the global average price of electricity from coal-fired plants, which is about 50 a megawatt hour.

Wind was a little cheaper than solar on average, though in northern Europe it was much less.

In California, renewable energy prices were already on a par with fossil fuel energy prices.

And Tubiana said she had been told by South African officials that in this country, too, renewable energy costs would soon be down to the cost of its dominant coal-fired electricity.

These changes in the real energy economy had contributed largely to greenhouse gas emissions stabilising last year for the first time.

“The problem is to upscale it. Because this is only incremental. That is the challenge for Paris. Not dreaming that Paris will solve the issue. Paris has to set the framework where we can to it effectively.

“We cannot do that by government alone. We will have to have the financiers, the companies and the mayors. We have to create a coalition, a movement, or it will not work.”

The Paris agreement would not be binding, because that was politically impossible, especially because emerging and developing nations were now emitting most of the carbon.

“So we can’t divide things and say you can emit this and you can emit that. We can’t find a formula so the system is based on voluntary pledges.”

The agreement should further encourage research and development in renewables by giving a signal to investors and private companies that governments were finally serious about climate change and would implement the necessary policies.

“Then much of the effort directed to fossil energy now would be redirected towards these new sectors. In reality, the battle behind the climate agreement is economic sectors betting on the new wave of technology against the old ones.”

Paris would have to map a “transformative pathway” towards the target of staying under the plus 2ºC limit, not doing it all immediately but agreeing on a system of constant improvement, never backsliding.

This should create a “virtuous circle” of climate control actions, as government and market actions reinforced each other.

It would include increasing collaboration among countries to help each other, for instance through joint efforts to master vital outstanding technologies such as electricity storage – which would make a quantum leap by converting intermittent renewable energy from windmills and solar plants into baseload electricity.

A global carbon market would not be established soon because that would require setting global limits on carbon emission. But national or regional carbon markets – like those in Europe and in China – would continue to be set up, she forecast.

And she also predicted that after Paris there would be a revival in the energy and investment devoted to carbon capture and sequestration (CCS), which had flagged because of the low carbon price.

That was already happening in fossil fuel-rich countries such as the Gulf states, where Saudi Arabia for one was already investing serious money in it.

And if the plus 2ºC limit is eventually exceeded, there might still be ways of clawing the planet back below that.

“If people begin to think seriously, you have very many avenues of technology,” said Tubiana.

“Climate change is not for your grandchildren. It’s happening now.”

California is inserting renewable energy into the grid at a rate we in France thought impossible