China's climate pledge to meet a quarter of global needs: IEA

法新社Marlowe Hood

PARIS (AFP) – China's pledge on greenhouse gases means it would shoulder more than a quarter of the CO2 emissions cuts needed to avoid dangerous global warming, a top economist said Thursday.

"China alone would be responsible for more than 25 percent of the reductions the world needs" to limit planetary warming to 2.0 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), said Fatih Birol, chief economist at the International Energy Agency (IEA).

"The world needs to decrease the emissions by 3.8 gigatonnes [billion tonnes of carbon dioxide], and China would cut by around one gigatonne.

"This would put China at the forefront of the fight against climate change," he told AFP in an interview.

In a long-awaited announcement, the world's No. 1 emitter declared on Thursday it would use 40- to 45-percent less carbon per unit of GDP by 2020 compared with 2005 levels -- in essence, a massive energy-efficiency drive.

Birol also hailed Washington's announcement the day before that the US would -- relative to a 2005 benchmark -- scale back carbon emissions by 17 percent by 2020, 30 percent by 2025, 42 percent by 2030 and 83 percent by 2050.

"This decision is going to change the entire mood and structure of the Copenhagen discussion," he said of the US position.

The United States and China are the world's two biggest carbon polluters, together accounting for 41 percent of global emissions, according to IEA figures.

With the exception of India, they are also the last major emitters to put their cards on the table ahead of the December 7-18 UN climate talks in Copenhagen tasked with hammering out a durable fix to global warming.

Together, the two announcements are "extremely important and positive," Birol said.

China's voluntary commitments will require 400 billion dollars in investment in the energy sector over the next decade, the IEA has calculated.

But Beijing will reap major benefits too.

"China kills three birds with this decision," Birol said: reducing the country's CO2 emissions; improving its energy security and energy infrastructure; and catapulting China into a "green industry" leader.

Most of the policies Beijing has said it will put in place to achieve the so-called carbon intensity aim are "mainly driven by energy security and local pollution concerns," Birol added.

"But at the end of the day, they also help to address climate change. You know the dictum of Deng Xiaoping -- 'it doesn't matter if the cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice'."

A critical uncertainty remains on the US commitment, Birol said: "How much of this 17 percent reduction is domestic efforts, and how much is international offsets? This is not clear."

Under the Kyoto Protocol, the cornerstone treaty of the UN's Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), rich countries can write off greenhouse-gas reduction commitments by investing in "green" projects in developing countries.

Some experts question these "offsets," saying that they do not achieve reductions in volume terms by big emitters.

"For us [the IEA], the US efforts would have to be almost entirely domestic," Birol said.

In its Energy Outlook report released in October, the IEA calculated the carbon-cutting efforts required from each of the world's major emitters to avoid breaching the 2.0 C (3.6 F) threshold.

The projections for 2020 and 2030 seen for Beijing and Washington were "spot on," Birol said proudly. For China, the projection for 2020 is based on a forecast eight-percent annual growth in GDP.

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