China appealed on Monday to exclude its giant export sector in the next treaty on climate change, as doubts grow whether the world can close ranks by a deadline of December.
Rich nations buying Chinese goods bear responsibility, a Chinese negotiator said, estimating that export production caused up to 20 percent of the Asian power’s carbon emissions.
“It is a very important item to make a fair agreement,” senior Chinese climate official Li Gao (李高) said during a visit to Washington.
Climate envoys from China, Japan and the EU were holding talks with the White House as the clock ticks to the December conference in Copenhagen meant to approve a post-Kyoto Protocol deal.
Developed nations demand that developing countries such as China and India take action under the new treaty. They had no obligations under the Kyoto Protocol, leading former US president George W. Bush to reject it.
But Li said it was unfair to put the highest burden on China, which by some measures has surpassed the US as the world’s top emitter.
“We are at the low end of the production line for the global economy,” Li told a forum.
“We produce products and these products are consumed by other countries, especially the developed countries. This share of emissions should be taken by the consumers but not the producers,” he said.
Li said Beijing was not trying to avoid action on climate change, adding that US President Barack Obama in his address to Congress last month said China “has launched the largest effort in history to make their economy energy efficient.”
Li’s remarks were met with skepticism, with other negotiators saying it would be a logistical nightmare to find a way to regulate carbon emissions at exports’ destinations.
Asking importers to handle emissions “would mean that we would also like them to have jurisdiction and legislative powers in order to control and limit those,” top EU climate negotiator Artur Runge-Metzger said.
“I’m not sure whether my Chinese colleague would agree on that particular point,” he said.
China’s chief climate official, Xie Zhenhua (謝振華), was also in Washington, where he met US global warming point man Todd Stern, who praised Beijing’s “broad work” on climate change but sought greater cooperation.
“This is a historic opportunity for both countries to contribute to a better future for the planet,” the State Department quoted Stern as saying.
But Obama has run into resistance in Congress from members of the Republican Party who say tough measures to reduce emissions would hurt the economy.
Eileen Claussen, president of the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, which organized the forum, said that countries should be ready to accept setting only a framework in Copenhagen.
“We can still make very substantial progress toward a final agreement and perhaps the best way to do that is aiming for a strong interim agreement in Copenhagen,” she said.
Runge-Metzger said the EU believed the world now had the political will for an agreement in Copenhagen but said “it doesn’t have to be a deal that goes into each and every technical detail.”
DISCONTENT: The CCP finds positive content about the lives of the Chinese living in Taiwan threatening, as such video could upset people in China, an expert said Chinese spouses of Taiwanese who make videos about their lives in Taiwan have been facing online threats from people in China, a source said yesterday. Some young Chinese spouses of Taiwanese make videos about their lives in Taiwan, often speaking favorably about their living conditions in the nation compared with those in China, the source said. However, the videos have caught the attention of Chinese officials, causing the spouses to come under attack by Beijing’s cyberarmy, they said. “People have been messing with the YouTube channels of these Chinese spouses and have been harassing their family members back in China,”
The Central Weather Administration (CWA) yesterday said there are four weather systems in the western Pacific, with one likely to strengthen into a tropical storm and pose a threat to Taiwan. The nascent tropical storm would be named Usagi and would be the fourth storm in the western Pacific at the moment, along with Typhoon Yinxing and tropical storms Toraji and Manyi, the CWA said. It would be the first time that four tropical cyclones exist simultaneously in November, it added. Records from the meteorology agency showed that three tropical cyclones existed concurrently in January in 1968, 1991 and 1992.
GEOPOLITICAL CONCERNS: Foreign companies such as Nissan, Volkswagen and Konica Minolta have pulled back their operations in China this year Foreign companies pulled more money from China last quarter, a sign that some investors are still pessimistic even as Beijing rolls out stimulus measures aimed at stabilizing growth. China’s direct investment liabilities in its balance of payments dropped US$8.1 billion in the third quarter, data released by the Chinese State Administration of Foreign Exchange showed on Friday. The gauge, which measures foreign direct investment (FDI) in China, was down almost US$13 billion for the first nine months of the year. Foreign investment into China has slumped in the past three years after hitting a record in 2021, a casualty of geopolitical tensions,
‘SOMETHING SPECIAL’: Donald Trump vowed to reward his supporters, while President William Lai said he was confident the Taiwan-US partnership would continue Donald Trump was elected the 47th president of the US early yesterday morning, an extraordinary comeback for a former president who was convicted of felony charges and survived two assassination attempts. With a win in Wisconsin, Trump cleared the 270 electoral votes needed to clinch the presidency. As of press time last night, The Associated Press had Trump on 277 electoral college votes to 224 for US Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic Party’s nominee, with Alaska, Arizona, Maine, Michigan and Nevada yet to finalize results. He had 71,289,216 votes nationwide, or 51 percent, while Harris had 66,360,324 (47.5 percent). “We’ve been through so
RSS