A lot has been written about the new climate agreement between the US and China made at the APEC summit this week. Almost all of it is very positive, framing the agreement as a major policy breakthrough with big impacts on both international climate negotiations and on the climate change problem itself. I confess I’m much more skeptical. I don’t think the agreement signals much change from the status quo.
Criticism of the agreement has focused mostly on the Chinese side, claiming that China could or should do more to cut emissions. In the agreement, China promised not that it would reduce its emissions, but that its emissions would “peak” in 2030, or perhaps before. It’s possible that this would have happened anyway. The agreement clearly envisions continued rapid increase in Chinese emissions - in fact, it gives China an incentive to increase its emissions in two ways. First, by setting a time limit on fossil fuel expansion, it’s in China’s interest to complete emitting projects sooner, increasing emissions in the short term. Second, it’s in China’s interest to make its agreed emissions peak as high as possible. Fossil-fueled economic growth before 2030 gets more or less locked in, and once China starts cutting emissions after 2030, the higher its peak the more tons it has to bargain away. Future negotiations that include China as a developed country with emissions-cutting responsibilities might limit the impact of these perverse incentives, but the agreement does not.
Moreover, as Tyler Cowen points out China’s ability to make (and commit to) emissions cuts is limited - as in the US - by domestic factors. China is currently struggling to reduce its conventional air pollution (chiefly particulates). Coal, the worst offender in both climate and conventional pollution terms, makes up two thirds of China’s power mix (far greater than the US’ 20% or the world average of 30%). If controlling local air pollution is not sufficient to reduce the country’s dependence on coal, despite widespread public anger, then it’s hard to be optimistic that a climate agreement could change Chinese internal priorities and/or abilities.
Whether China can cut its coal use, I think, depends partly on popular pressure to reduce conventional pollution, but really on what cost-effective replacements are available. Of course we hope that those replacements are cheap renewables (or cheap, safe nuclear), but the most likely endgame for Chinese coal will come at the hands of Chinese shale gas. If you want China to fulfill this agreement, you can pray for too-cheap-to-meter solar, but you should hope for a Chinese shale gas revolution even larger than that in the US.
The US promise is similarly underwhelming. All that the President has promised to China is an emissions-reduction target that lies on the path toward targets that he has already promised in other contexts (notably at Copenhagen in 2009 which, to be fair, was some time ago in political terms). The stated emissions cuts can probably be achieved with policies proposed or already in place and which do not require new legislation (fuel economy standards and EPA’s performance standards for the electricity sector). This fact isn’t a discredit to the President and his administration - he has set out more ambitious climate goals than any past president, and backed them up with action. But the US-China agreement doesn’t offer much if anything new.
The agreement is also overrated from a legal perspective. It doesn’t bind either country today, much less in the future. As Jack Goldsmith writes, it is purely aspirational. That’s fine - political agreements can be important. But the agreement shouldn’t be oversold as something that will bind Obama’s (or Xi Jinping’s) successors in any meaningful way. The greatest risk to the President’s climate targets isn’t political backsliding, it’s legal challenges to EPA’s performance standards. A nonbinding political agreement will play no role in court.
The best that can be said for the agreement is that it may have some rhetorical impact. It could, for example, undercut political arguments within the US and China that inaction by the other country justifies continued inaction at home. I leave it to political experts to debate how and whether the agreement (or the President’s general climate policy) will affect the next presidential election cycle. The agreement could also prove useful at next year’s Paris climate negotiations. It might, for example, put some pressure on India or other developing-world emitters to agree to similar goals, or encourage Europe to adopt the bolder goals it has promised to achieve if other large countries make commitments. But even if so, the outcome of Paris is likely to be a similar political agreement, not a treaty. It remains to be seen whether agreements made there are any more significant than that made this week.
