Climate deal merits skeptical view

The climate-change deal negotiated between the United States and China is one of two things:

A) A groundbreaking agreement that finally gets China to commit to cutting back carbon emissions in an effort to slow global warming.

Or B) An unenforceable treaty that puts all the onus on the United States to fulfill its commitments years before China would be expected to do anything.

If you accept the talking points at face value, then you may believe, as Al Gore does, that the Chinese concession is “a signal of groundbreaking progress from the world’s largest polluter.” You may believe that we have to start somewhere, and this is the best concession we can hope to get from China, which has been in the midst of a mad expansion of manufacturing and power production for two decades.

But before we get too excited, let’s look at the nuts and bolts of the deal. As outlined by President Obama on his trip to China, the United States is committed to reducing its emissions to substantially below the benchmark year of 2005. President Obama has already committed to cutting emissions to 83 percent of the 2005 benchmark year by 2020, and now he has agreed to cut emissions by approximately another 10 percent by 2025. That means the U.S. will cut carbon dioxide production to less than 75 percent of what it was in 2005.

Meanwhile, what does China do? Not much.

Actually, China gets to continue its aggressive expansion of industry for 16 years — until 2030 — at which point they would declare that they had reached their benchmark year. Thereafter they would commit to some vague decline in carbon production, which presumably will be negotiated by some future president.

If you are paying attention, this is a hugely lopsided deal that puts all the mandated change on the United States and all the vague hope on China. It also ignores the fact that the United States in 2005 was nowhere as near as big a polluter as China in 2014, let alone 2030. Don’t believe us? Then fly to Beijing and breathe the air! Maybe Los Angeles smog at its worst in the 1970s was that bad, but frankly we doubt it. 

In some respects, this seems more like an economic equalization plan than a climate deal, in which the United States is granting China a free pass to capture an even bigger share of the manufacturing dollar while our own economy retrenches and our quality of life suffers. But it’s even worse than that. As our readers know, starting this year, China’s economy is already ranked the world’s biggest. How much bigger will that superpower’s advantage be if we rein in our own economy for the next 16 years while throwing gas on China’s?

Oh that’s right, this is a climate deal, not an economic deal, but is the United States really supposed to turn a blind eye to the economic damage the bilateral agreement will cause to our own country?

Cutting back on carbon emissions and other pollutants is sound policy, but we should not fool ourselves that we have any leverage over China now, and certainly not in 2030.

Editorials represent the majority opinion of the Daily Inter Lake’s editorial board.