World turned upside down.

Grist post asks "Did China block Copenhagen progress to pave way for its own dominance in cleantech?"

A little far-fetched ... but point well-taken. I don't think it was active blocking, so much as China already was going to pursue its unilateral carbon intensity goals, national action plan on climate, and far-reaching energy and green technology policies. No skin off its nose whatever came out of Copenhagen. If the US was going to be idiotic and still not take any action (in reality, it's not COP15 that matters for the US, it's what happens in the Senate this spring), then so much the better -- they'd be even slower off the block and slower to catch up.

Did China block Copenhagen progress to pave way for its own dominance in cleantech?


22 Jan 2010 6:31 PM
by Geoffrey Lean

You hear it all the time, one of the most frequently voiced excuses for Western countries failing to radically cut carbon dioxide emissions: Taking any such action would hand a massive competitive advantage to fast-industrializing China.

Yet evidence is piling up that the very opposite is the case. The main challenge from the world’s new industrial superpower is not that it will continue to use the dirty, old technologies of the past, but that it will come to dominate the new, clean, green ones of the future.

As developed nations fail to put an adequate price on carbon, and thus to stimulate clean-technology development themselves, they risk handing market supremacy to the rival they most fear. Indeed, it could even be hypothesized that China’s blocking of agreement on rich-country emission targets in Copenhagen was intended to hold back the development of cleantech by its Western rivals.

Visitor after distinguished visitor to the world’s most populous country returns home shaken, if not stirred, by the speed and determination with which it is adopting these technologies, especially in renewable energy. David Sandalow, the U.S. assistant secretary of energy for policy and international affairs—a longtime expert in the field, both in and out of government, who has trekked across the Pacific five times since last summer—says, “China’s investment in clean energy is extraordinary. Unless the U.S. makes investments, we are not competitive in the cleantech sector in the years and decades to come.”