Why climate-shaming China at COP26 likely won't work
CBC
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For a country that pollutes more than any other, China, with its 1.4 billion people, has an unusually small footprint at the COP26 climate summit underway in Glasgow, Scotland.
President Xi Jinping skipped the leaders' portion of the Glasgow event, and in COP26's grand conference room, there's no colourful Chinese pavilion the way there has been at every other UN climate summit.
China's delegation office is essentially a large office cubicle with a flag outside. It is overshadowed by the Pacific micro-state of Tuvalu just around the corner, which has an attention-getting display focused on the impact of rising ocean levels.
Chinese boots on the ground are also thin. Rather than sending the usual hundreds of delegates, China's government dispatched perhaps 50 at the most.
All of this is fuelling criticism — especially from U.S. President Joe Biden, former president Barack Obama and other top American leaders — that China has become a climate action laggard.
But analysts say this misreads China's broader progress on transitioning to a low-carbon world.
China is responsible for roughly 26 per cent of the world's annual greenhouse gas emissions.
Just days before COP26's opening, the country released a new plan to lower them, but critics said it contained little in the way of new "ambition." Rather, China restated a forecast that it will hit peak emissions by 2030 and reduce its "carbon intensity" after that.
Coal, a mainstay of Chinese energy production, will remain dominant for decades to come, although the country will start phasing it out in 2025.
In a keynote speech on Monday, Obama chided China's leadership, suggesting it all adds up to a lack of commitment to making COP26 a success.
It reflects "a dangerous lack of urgency," said Obama, singling out not only China but Russia as well.
But analysts who've followed China's slow transition from a fossil fuel behemoth to an emerging clean energy giant say the reality of China's commitment to hitting the goals laid out in the 2015 Paris climate accord — and updated here in Glasgow — is more nuanced.
"Not having President Xi Jinping [at the summit] opened China up to this type of criticism that they're not committed to the climate change issue," said Angel Hsu, an assistant professor of public policy and the environment at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, speaking to CBC at the summit.
