INTERVIEW: Greenpeace China: Beijing boards climate train

By Laszlo Trankovits Dec 8, 2011, 13:28 GMT

Durban, South Africa - Even Greenpeace believes that the Chinese government is willing in principle to get on board with a new international climate agreement after 2020.

'I am very sure that the Chinese government is ready to move to the next level,' Li Yan, head of Greenpeace in China, told dpa on Thursday.

Her assessment reflected a growing attitude among nongovernmental organizations in Durban that China is more willing to compromise - and has done more to develop green technology - than the United States.

The Durban climate talks are entering the backstretch, with the question still up in the air about the way forward after the Kyoto Protocol expires in December 2012. China and the United States have not yet formally conceded to European Union demands that they join talks about binding emissions cuts before the EU agrees to a Kyoto extension.

The uncertainty in the Chinese delegation, as in its US counterpart, is over the timeline, Li Yan said.

In Durban, China is increasingly seen as the key to long-range efforts for a broader global treaty, and the question is whether Beijing will join Washington in a coalition of the unwilling or cooperate with the EU, Martin Kaiser of Germany's Greenpeace coalition told dpa.

The Chinese leadership has plenty of good will, but does not put enough priority on reducing carbon emissions, Li Yan said. And it encounters widespread domestic resistance to painful carbon reductions.

She added that the government has been 'on the right track' since 2005, but was still not doing enough.

In order to attain voluntary reductions in greenhouse emissions and energy use, Beijing has put increasing pressure on its provinces and cities. Factories are sometimes ordered to shut down production, or traffic and street lights are simply turned off, and entire city neighbourhoods are blacked out 'to achieve the energy-saving targets,' Li Yan said.

An interesting aspect of China's policies is its discovery that there's money to be made in renewable energy and energy efficiency.

'The climate issue is being treated not only as an environmental issue, it's more importantly a development issue,' Li Yan said.

In fact, in 2010, China installed about half of the world's renewable energy facilities. Producers of solar collectors and wind mills in the US and Europe even complain that China now dominates the international market by under-pricing its products.

The most important goal for China is to phase out fossil fuels as the country's most important energy source, Li Yan said. But China clearly prioritizes economic growth, and environmental questions come second.

Beijing has recognized that China can play a positive role on the international stage with the image of the good guy. But at home, there is lingering suspicion that the effort to reduce carbon emissions 'is a western tactic to stop China's development,' she said.

After the climate talks in Copenhagen in 2009, when China came under fire over its resistance to an extension of the Kyoto Protocol, China's conservative forces jumped on the issue.

To explain the bitter reaction across China after those criticism, Li Yan cited a popular saying: 'Look, this is what happens, whatever we do we are criticized. We will be the bad guys (and we don't) give a shit about it.'

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