Government and Politics

What Obama’s win means for China

YES, WE DID! And I was there! Here’s a shot of the rally at Grant Park in Chicago, where an estimated 125,000 people showed up to support the Obama-Biden ticket:

Obama’s decisive and historic victory in the U.S. presidential election brings many hopes and promises.

What could his tenure in the White House mean for China’s environment?

Bloomberg.com reports that Obama’s “protectionist” trade policies may lead to opposition in many Asian countries.

Obama’s goal of corralling developing economies into binding pollution-reduction commitments and his pledges to insert labor and environmental standards in trade agreements may spark unified opposition in an Asia that has more tools than ever to resist Western pressure.

The article says that Obama may develop a more “moderate” approach once he is sworn into office, mainly “because the U.S. needs China’s help to solve the financial crisis that threatens economies worldwide with recession” and can’t afford to risk losing China’s support by being “too tough.”

And since “the global financial meltdown has undermined the U.S. as an economic model and advocate of free-market policies” then the U.S. is especially not in a good position to take a hard line.

“The U.S. capacity to dictate terms on trade and environment issues to Asia has weakened considerably,” said N. Bhaskara Rao, chairman of the Centre For Media Studies, a political-policy group in New Delhi. “They are done in, big-time, by the economic mess they are in.”

This means China is probably more likely to gain the support of developing countries when it comes to dealing with trade and climate change issues than America. But China’s influence and leadership in this case is a bit worrisome, seeing that the big Asian nation is not willing to sacrifice economic growth to shift its energy structure, and it also tends to point fingers at the U.S. and other Western countries as being responsible for solving the climate crisis, when instead, what we need is global collaboration.

Indeed, the environment is one of the most important items to confront on Obama’s to-do list.

From The Guardian:

“The environment is as much a foreign policy issue as a domestic one, given the 13-month deadline for a new UN climate change treaty. Obama has committed to global carbon emissions caps as a means to help China and India come on board the UN pact, but that requires a reliable plan to rein in Big Oil, King Coal, and other fossil-fuel producers with fearsome political clout. If Obama cannot coax Congress into passing a climate bill by summer 2009, expect the young president to fight climate change with one stroke of his pen through new regulations.”

To be more specific about Obama’s current plan, “He would set a goal of reducing US emissions to 1990 levels by 2020 and by 80 percent by 2050, using a cap-and-trade system and a 10-year programme worth 150 billion dollars in renewable energy research and deployment,” according to the AFP. “He would not wait for China and India to act, but insist they must not be far behind making their own binding commitments, Obama aides told Nature, the British science journal, last month.”

Ah, again, the hopes and promises. But they mean nothing if the U.S. Congress fails to act and reach consensus.

Traditionally, it takes a US president months to appoint a cabinet and gain Congressional approval for it.

Then there is the mammoth challenge of a carbon emissions bill, which powerful utilities and oil corporations may well fight every inch of the way.

…

…other countries will be demanding “some indication” that Congress will go along with Obama’s climate policies. In 1997, the US Senate — whose approval is needed to ratify a treaty — voted 98-0 against the Clinton administration’s approval of the Kyoto format.

….

To marshall support, Obama could argue that investment in renewables will create jobs and channel some of the revenues from the carbon market to the public’s benefit, said some analysts.

He could also argue that energy efficiency is linked to to national security, weaning the US away from imported fossil fuels from volatile regions.

Only time will tell if Obama’s plans will gain public support. He’ll have to make a strong business case for these policies, because people won’t want to help the environment if it doesn’t help their bottom line.

Bill McKibben from Yale Environment 360 talks about some of the big pieces of legislation that Obama should push for domestically, and I add my two cents about how it could affect China in the long-run.

1. “Massive government investment in green energy.”

If successfuly, this could lift the U.S. out of its current financial crisis, and therefore re-establish its economic clout, especially with countries like China. Also, if the U.S. becomes more self-sufficient in green technology and creates more green-collar jobs, there will be less of a need to rely on China for imports or outsourcing jobs. For example, McKibben says, “you’re not going to send your house to China for a layer of fiberglass.”

2. “A stiff cap on carbon, which will help drive the process.”

McKibben says, “Current versions of cap-and-trade are too weak and too riddled with loopholes — getting a clean, tough bill through Congress needs to be a preoccupation of President Obama.”

3. “Once the president has done all that tough stuff at home, he’ll need to do it all over again, globally.”

In December 2009, world leaders will meet in Copenhagen to come up with a successor to the Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012. “This will represent the last legitimate shot the world has at putting itself on a new carbon regime in time to make any difference,” McKibben says. China and the U.S. will need to display strong leadership in order to create any real impact. Hopefully, the global economy will be in better shape by then, or else we’ll be faced with the same ol’ excuses of not wanting to save the planet for fear of further harming business and limiting development.

Some final thoughts from McKibben:

It will be incredibly difficult, mostly because we begin from such unequal places. China has lots of coal and it would like to burn it, because it’s the cheapest way to pull rural Chinese out of dire poverty (something the country’s leaders would quite like to do because otherwise they won’t be the country’s leaders much longer). If we want them to use, say, windmills instead, we’re going to need to “share some wealth,” north to south, to make it happen. The Chinese opened the bidding last week, with a suggestion that one percent of the U.S. annual GDP would be a good amount to send their way. That’s going to be quite a political ask — it means that Americans would be working roughly one hour every two weeks just to help the global South build up their clean alternatives. What we’re talking about is a carbon version of the Marshall Plan, and it would mean Obama needs to be not just FDR but Truman and Ike as well.

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