Abby L. Harvey
GHG Monitor
12/5/2014
The recently announced climate agreement reached between the U.S. and China could have a significant impact on global climate negotiations, Todd Stern, Special Envoy for Climate Change with the U.S. State Department, said at an event hosted by the Center for American Progress early last week. Under the agreement, the United States has committed to reducing net greenhouse gas emissions 26-28 percent below 2005 levels by 2025 and China has committed to setting targets to peak CO2 emissions by 2030 and to increase non-fossil fuel energy production to 20 percent of their energy mix by 2030. To do this, the announcement says, work to advance clean coal innovations, among other steps, will be ramped up. “I think it was always in our view something that would have potentially a very significant positive impact with respect to both the climate relationship between the U.S. and China, the broader relationship between the U.S. and China and of course the big multi-lateral climate negotiations and hopefully that will all prove to be true,” Stern said.
The deal, having been made at the presidential level, will hopefully spur similar agreements by other countries, Stern said. This is important going into the Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change to be held in Paris in 2015 during which members will work to develop a universal agreement on climate actions. “Our sense is that the way that this will resonate in the broader climate community will rattle a lot of things up no doubt, but I think it will overall be very positive. I think it will give momentum to the negotiations. I think it will spur countries to come forward with their own targets and I think generally … if you were holding stock in the Paris negotiation, your stock would have gone up after this announcement because here you have the two historic antagonists, the two biggest players on climate change having come together at the presidential level and to say we’re going to work together, here’s what we’re each doing,” Stern said.
Beyond the fact that the agreement was reached at the presidential level, the ambitious nature of the targets agreed to is significant, Stern said. However, while the targets are ambitious, they are achievable using only the legislative resources currently available. “It was designed to be as ambitious as we possibly could on the basis of authorities that we knew that we had. We didn’t want to come up with a pie-in-the-sky kind of target that’s based on legislation that we might not be able to get,” Stern explained.
India Important Moving Forward, Presents Complicated Situation
The U.S. and China represent the two largest emitters of carbon dioxide in the world, with India a distant, though growing third. India however represents a complicated situation in that a large portion of its citizens do not have electricity, leaving the country to try to address that energy poverty in an environmentally conscious way. “India is huge, it’s going to be hopefully growing at a rapid pace and the way they grow, the carbon intensity with which they do or don’t grow is going to be very important going forward,” Stern said. “I think that the most important thing at some level is for India to see that there is a path both to growth, to eradicating poverty and to energy access … They’ve got to see if there’s a path to get to those fundamental development needs that they have that is as low-carbon as possible, that is relatively low-carbon that is not based on a big bet on long-term dirty coal and that’s going to be very challenging.”
With India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi having only been in office for a few months, it remains unclear how the two countries will work together on climate issues, though thus far things seem to be going well, Stern said. “It’s a little bit too early to say where exactly they’re going to position themselves with respect to negotiations. I think that on the one hand India is an enormously important country. On the other hand, I think that they bristle a little bit at the notion that they’re seen as ‘China and India’ as if they go together. They’re third, but it’s a distant third compared to China,” Stern said. “I think that our inclination is certainly to want to work with them as closely as possible. Exactly how they’re going to play in the negotiations, exactly how they’re going to play in Lima, Paris, I don’t know. We’ve had a very good relationship overall with India in climate talks.”
