Trevor Houser, Peterson Institute for International Economics writes:
The current economic crisis casts a pall over climate-change talks held this month in Poland. While negotiators hoped for concrete progress toward an international climate agreement, the world’s two largest polluters were distracted—the United States with preventing a collapse of the financial system in the midst of a presidential transition, China with a slowdown in domestic investment and weakening foreign demand for its manufactured goods. With American home values and retirement savings falling and Chinese unemployment numbers rising, observers worry that neither America nor China will have much appetite to cut emissions.
The paradox here is that the crisis presents a unique opportunity for the United States and China to strike a deal that would lay the groundwork for a global climate agreement. Indeed, one of the main goals of the most recent biannual meeting of the US/China Strategic Economic Dialogue (held the week before the climate talks began) was to begin work under the “Ten Year Energy and Environment Cooperation Framework” created earlier this year.
This bilateral initiative comes on the heels of a decade in which America abstained from international efforts to address climate change, concerned that if it acts but China doesn’t, the world will fail to meet its emission-reduction targets and US industry will be disadvantaged. China has countered that its historic and per capita emissions remain well below US levels, and that to cap aggregate national emissions at the same level as the United States would imply a personal carbon budget in San Francisco five times greater than in Shanghai.
