Experts Say China Could Help Produce A Greener World

By Julianne LaJeunesse- University of New Mexico

Experts at a Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholar’s forum Friday said that if China is given adequate financial and political support, the country could go from being one of the world’s biggest polluters, to one that produces more green technology using less environmentally unfriendly energy.

Barbara Finamore, the director of the China program at the Natural Resources Defense Council, made it clear that China’s capacity to create green technology with better uses of energy would not be a “Sputnik race,” rather every country would benefit from investing in a clean-up of China’s energy use.

“This is a race where the opening up of the Chinese domestic market for renewable energy is also a major opportunity for U.S. companies to that are well-positioned… to take advantage of it and understand it,” Finamore said.

Finamore, who just returned from China, said in order for China to become more environmentally accepted in the international community, cleaning up their energy consumption must occur provincially.

“What we’ve been able to do… is work in the pilot project level,” Finamore said. “That’s where the rubber meets the road, that’s where you need to make a difference if you’re really going to be able to achieve whatever climate agreements China makes. But we also help to translate them into national policy… in both China and the U.S. and into international policy.”

The pilot project level Finamore referred to is a province-based test run of energy standard implementation, which if successful, could change national policy because, according to Finamore, China’s pricing bureau “is never going to agree to open up the regulatory system for collecting electricity rates to energy efficiency, unless they’re sure these programs already work on the ground.”

David Doniger, a senior attorney and policy director also from NRDC said that it’s in both the United States and China’s interest to agree on a method of halting negative energy consumption that causes global warming via carbon and greenhouse gas emissions, or GHG.

Doniger noted that some American and international concerns regarding China’s emissions, are relevant, including tensions regarding proposed methods to control emissions, such as: border adjustments, allowances and leakage.

He added that U.S. Cap-and-Trade legislation like the House’s Waxman-Markey and the Senate’s Kerry-Boxer bills should not be seen by China as part of a broader U.S. trade agenda, rather as a legitimate method the United States is using to change its relationship with the environment.

Doniger and Finamore were joined by Lynn Price of the Lawrence Berkley National Laboratory, a group who in 2007 won a Nobel Peace Prize for their work on climate change.