After one week of little progress at the UN climate talks in Cancun, Mexico, Chinese negotiators have offered a proposal that some analysts are calling a “game-changer.”

According to reports from Reuters, Xinhua News Agency and other media outlets, China is working to encourage developed countries to continue with the binding agreements set out in the Kyoto Protocol beyond 2012 by offering to make its own internal pledge to slow growth in carbon emissions binding.

China pledged last year to reduce the carbon intensity of their emissions per unit of its gross domestic product (GDP) by 40-45 percent by 2020 from the 2005 level. China bound its commitment domestically through a State Council decision even before last year’s Copenhagen meeting.

The offer from China yesterday would codify that commitment under a UN resolution and allow it to be verifiable by external parties.

“We can create a resolution and that resolution can be binding on China,” said Huang Huikang, the Chinese Foreign Ministry’s envoy for climate change talks.

“Under the (U.N. Climate) Convention, we can even have a legally binding decision. We can discuss the specific form. We can make our efforts a part of international efforts,” Huang said.

The move from China is the closest they have come to agreeing to a verification regime for carbon emissions, one of the sticking points that prevented an agreement at the COP15 climate talks last year in Copenhagen.

Industrialized countries including the United States (which never ratified Kyoto), Russia, Canada and Japan have generally been opposed to continuing with Kyoto because it did not put any binding limits on developing countries. But that could change with Monday’s offer because China has never before agreed to any binding emissions cuts.

“This is a gamechanger,” said Jennifer Morgan from the Washington-based World Resources Institute.

“The suggestion has won a lot of support,” said Huang. “We hope it can help us find a solution to the emission reduction issue.”

Negotiators from China and the other so-called “BASIC” countries said they would be willing to move forward on a climate agreement if there was agreement on three “non-negotiable” components: agreement on a post-2012 commitment period for the Kyoto Protocol; a climate change fund had materialized and countries had come to an understanding on technology transfer.

The BASIC coalition, a group of the world’s largest developing economies (Brazil, China, South Africa, and India), held up an agreement in the final hours of last years talks in Copenhagen

“As long as all parties have sincere political wills, China thinks the talks will eventually achieve positive and meaningful results, and is confident that it will reflect what was laid out in the Bali road map,” Chinese negotiator Su Wei told Xinhua.

The news comes as several reports out of Cancun indicate an improved mood and an diplomatic thaw between negotiators from developed and developing nations. U.S. negotiators diplomats signaled Monday that an easing of tensions climate relations between the U.S. and China could actually lead to an agreement.

“We are the first and second largest emitters, and we are the first and second largest economies,” said U.S. negotiator Jonathan Pershing.

“We will work very hard going forward to find common ground, which I very much think we can achieve.”

Article by Timothy B. Hurst, appearing courtesy Celsias.

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China, which last year walked away from COP 15 without agreeing to anything, now wants to hold its own climate talks.

The talks, scheduled for October, according to the UN’s top environmental official, Achim Steiner, will take place in the northern Chinese port of Tianjin, northwest of Beijing.

Government officials around the industrialized world are hoping that the Tianjin talks will pave the way for a new, binding, climate change treaty after COP 15’s spectacular failure, and that the neutral and unofficial platform will offer some clues how to proceed during the Nov. 29 – Dec. 10, 2010 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC, or COP 16) talks scheduled in Cancun, Mexico.

This COP 16 itself is expected to deliver the key elements of a new climate change treaty to replace the Kyoto Protocol, the first global agreement ever put in force.

Unfortunately, expectations are like soap bubbles, and the Kyoto Protocol – adopted in December of 1997, made official in February of 2005, and ratified by 187 states as of November of 2009 – has never gained the signature of the United States, a member nation, or the unqualified approval of China, a non-member nation.

Several other nations, members and non-members alike, remain equally undecided, and how this is going to change at COP 16 has never been fully explained. Given the current Gulf of Mexico oil disaster, even the venue is uncertain.

But the question of China’s position on emissions may in fact be moot, even though many analysts have said that China’s reluctance to submit to emission reductions is directly related to its desire to catch up to the developed world.

If so, China’s reluctance is understandable. In order to become fully industrialized – and reach a level of economic prosperity closely paralleling (if never meeting, let alone exceeding) the developed world – China will have to focus its efforts on making and selling the “stuff” the Western world craves.

In order to do this, China has to partially ignore the emissions issue, which it rightly considers unfair, since developed nations have already achieved their prosperity at the expense of the environment (and atmospheric, biological and ocean carbon levels), but now want to make sure that nations like China and India can’t do the same.

In fact, China is tackling its emissions problem outside the conventional frameworks like Kyoto and COP (COnference of the Parties), opting instead to regulate carbon simply because energy efficiency and renewable energy are elements of the kind of 21st century economy it wants to construct anyway, according to Premier Wen Jiabao, who has already threatened to use force to close “energy hog” facilities like the Guangzhou Steel plant.

So why is China proposing a pre- UNFCCC meeting? The behavior, which many Western analysts see as disturbingly schizophrenic, may in fact be nothing more complex than “saving face”, a cultural and psychological tool highly valued among Asian peoples like the Chinese, Japanese and Koreans (but also esteemed in Latin American countries, where “face” has overtones of masculine aggression and dominance).

The concept of “face” originated with the Chinese. Their understanding of the term is extremely complicated, and seemingly ambiguous at times, but loosely means a perception of one’s own worth based on: social status; what one expects of oneself; and what is expected of one by others.

For example, if a Chinese diplomat offers a concession that looms large in his personal lexicon of values, and it is rejected out of hand and without discussion by someone whose values are different, the diplomat will experience a severe loss of face, both on the social and moral plain, especially if the rejection take place in public.

China, which is currently the world’s biggest carbon dioxide emitter, is clearly losing face over its emissions stance, and the Tianjin talks may be more about ego bolstering than emissions reduction, but who can blame Chinese diplomats?

China (and India, and other emerging economies) will never get the same-sized slice of the prosperity pie as the U.S. and the EU achieved in the run-up-to-recession years starting in mid-1999, simply because there aren’t enough natural resources left on Earth to allow that to happen.

Western diplomats at COP 16 might want to give China back its face. There is little left to offer in the name of continued peace and prosperity.

Article by Jeanne Roberts, appearing courtesy Celsias.

photo: KyFlick

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In spite of leaps and bounds in technology, investment capital, political support and public will over the past decade – much less the past year – there is one element of a revolution that has not emerged in the clean tech movement: an icon. Sure, standard-bearers of the green movement that began in the 1960’s are still visible and active and there are brilliant scientists, entrepreneurs and politicians out there who might be candidates. But, as greens cast about for their own JFK in government, or a Green Gates in the private sector, what they really need is their own Green Gandhi. He may be emerging.

Not content to play politics behind-the-scenes, President Mohamed Nasheed of Maldives has taken his quest to save his country to the level of zealotry. Nasheed’s Indian Ocean nation is part of an archipelago of islands sitting just 2 meters above sea level. For Nasheed and his countrymen, climate change is not just the primary challenge of the 21st century, it is a matter of survival.

Not only does Nasheed have an urgency that few others can lay claim to, but his case for getting cleaner and greener has a moral heft that is difficult for even the most compelling global clean tech business leaders to trump. Like Gandhi, Nasheed has staked his entire political life on a single existential question for his people, and he is taking his fight to Copenhagen, to the ocean floor and everywhere in between. The question for 100 years hence is not only whether students will learn the lesson of a heroic effort to save the planet, but whether there will be any students in places like Maldives at all.

[photo credit: PresidencyMaldives]

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