Why didn’t China want to give foreign experts permission to study carbon emissions inside China? John Lee writes at ForeignPolicy.com:
“… these international teams would undoubtedly discover exactly how dysfunctional the heart of the country really is. They would see firsthand and report back how China’s 45 million local officials remain the most formidable obstacle to improving transparency in China’s sprawling economic structure — protecting their turf, defending their privileges, arbitrarily enforcing the law, and when it comes to economic performance, blatantly cooking the books.”
The short of it, Lee says, is that Beijing couldn’t get local power brokers on board to meet emissions requirements even if it wanted to. It’s an old story about central control in China; that is, the mountains are high and the emperor is far away. So, what actually happened in Copenhagen? At the Guardian, Mark Lynas says he was in the room when China wrecked the deal on climate change. And China’s leader wasn’t.
What I saw was profoundly shocking. The Chinese premier, Wen Jinbao, (sic) did not deign to attend the meetings personally, instead sending a second-tier official in the country’s foreign ministry to sit opposite Obama himself. The diplomatic snub was obvious and brutal, as was the practical implication: several times during the session, the world’s most powerful heads of state were forced to wait around as the Chinese delegate went off to make telephone calls to his “superiors”.
And why did China deep six a deal? Lynas says it had everything to do with geopolitics.
China knows it is becoming an uncontested superpower; indeed its newfound muscular confidence was on striking display in Copenhagen. Its coal-based economy doubles every decade, and its power increases commensurately. Its leadership will not alter this magic formula unless they absolutely have to.
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