The China paradox, circa 2009

Doing a run through the news narrative for the 2009 COP-15 meeting of the climate change negotiations really makes it starkly clear why they failed, I think.

China is at the heart of it. On the one hand, China was making really absurd demands for huge emissions cuts from the developed countries. On the other hand, you have quite a lot of buzz in the year prior to the negotiating round about how hard China is working on cutting energy use and emissions. Take this FT article, for instance:

China will be in the forefront of combating climate change by 2020 if it meets government targets on reducing greenhouse gas emissions, the International Energy Agency suggest. ... "If China reaches its targets... its emissions [growth] will have declined so much by 2020 that it will be the country that has achieved the largest emissions reductions. ... China's strong showing in curbing emissions will make negotiations on a global agreement on climate change easier (emphasis mine). (Financial Times, Sept. 21, 2009)

The two things are contradictory. "China is taking emissions seriously and that will make negotiating easier" vs. "China is making huge, plainly impossible negotiating demands." People had to square that contradiction mentally, and unfortunately, they ended up paying more attention to the optimistic side of the contradiction than to the pessimistic side.

That mistake, I think, comes back to a fundamental misread of what was going on in China domestically. Yes, China was making huge efforts to cut the energy (and hence emissions) intensity of its population and industry. But it wasn't doing that because it was seeing the light on emissions. As I've said before, it was doing that because in order to maintain stability it must continue providing increasing economic growth and improving living standards to its populace. That means huge increases in the additional power needed, which are simply physically hard to meet purely by increasing supply. So China is also pushing hard on the demand side, trying to reduce energy needed per person and per unit GDP.

It was also exacerbated by the fact that around the same time, the US was starting to look like more and more of an obstacle. People have limited cognitive scope, and with one obstacle apparently growing, there was a cognitive pressure to be optimistic about China in a "the REAL problem is the US; China's fine!" sort of way, I think.

To the west, China looked like it might be getting serious about emissions. It wasn't.