Climate change: Common ground between China and US

THOUGH Washington and Beijing have their differences over issues including the South China Sea and cyber security, for the most part Chinese President Xi Jinping and US President Barack Obama have similar climate goals. In a joint statement with the White House on Sept. 25, Beijing announced that China will implement its cap-and-trade emissions program in 2017 and will invest $3 billion to help developing countries combat climate change. The announcement has added to the momentum behind the December 2015 climate summit in Paris, where organizers hope to reach a binding deal to tackle climate change.

Though Xi’s push to curb China’s emissions appears sincere, Beijing will find the transition to its long-planned countrywide cap-and-trade program difficult. The Chinese economy is slowing down, and fettering the country’s industrial base — arguably the sector that has declined the most in recent months — even more will only worsen the problem. When China first began discussing the implementation of the emissions program in the early 2010s, the Chinese economy was still experiencing high economic growth. Now, China’s cap-and-trade program will have to be implemented in a way that does not overly burden industry but that meets the social demand to increase environmental standards and control emissions. Still, economic priorities will trump environmental ones, which means that Beijing’s actual ability to enact a serious carbon-trading program will be limited, or at the very least slowed.