China

Change needed for UN climate talks

By Li Xing (China Daily)
Updated: 2010-12-01 08:09

CANCUN, Mexico - Bruno Rebelle, the general-director of Paris-based Synergence, does not own a car - nor does he encourage others to buy one.

People living in big cities like Paris - or even Beijing - do not need a car if their city has a strong, affordable and convenient public transport system and provides easy access for renting a car, said Rebelle, the former director for development of Greenpeace International.

"Owning even one car is too much," he told China Daily in an exclusive interview in Tangier, Morocco, two weeks ahead of the opening of the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Cancun, Mexico.

"My real conviction is going into low-carbon lifestyle," he said, adding that coming technological changes and social innovations will "allow us to be happy and low emitters".

The advocacy of a low-carbon lifestyle is part and parcel of his bigger conviction that the ongoing global climate talks should take into account the per capita greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) of individual countries.

"The international climate change debate and negotiations have been driven, first of all, by the measure of greenhouse gas emissions by country - which, in my view, is pretty unfair," he said. "It is not the right basis (by which) to fit the initial UN framework convention on climate change - which is clear on the idea of 'common but differentiated responsibilities'."

"There is a fundamental inequity of CO2 emission in per capita terms and it is also an important element in understanding where we are coming from," he said.

Take the world's two biggest emitters, the United States and China, he said. China's per-person GHG emissions are around one quarter of the US', he added, citing calculations by the Union of Concerned Scientists.

"Clearly there should not be the same type of responsibility when it comes to cutting emissions," he said. "It does not mean that China should not cut its emissions, but the speed and the intensity of cutting emissions should be differentiated from one country to another based on emission per capita, too."

Other factors should include the financing capacity of a country, its size and density of its population, he said. Reductions cannot be the same when the population in one country is very dense, whereas the population in the other is very scattered.

Rebelle has shared his views at various international forums on climate change. Each time Rebelle says he faces the same question: What about China - since China is the biggest global emitter right now?

Rebelle has visited China four times. During a trip earlier this year, he was struck that almost everybody he knows now owns a car.

"It is hard to live in Beijing with its smog and pollution," he said.

And "I'm not saying that China should go away without any commitment, when everybody on Earth will suffer from the consequences of climate change," he added.

"But the truth is that more developing groups will suffer more than rich groups," he said.

"In terms of per capita emission again, (China) is far below the ranking line - from the US, to European countries, and so on," he said.

It should be "easy" to explain why the burden on China should be equated differently from that of European countries, the US, Australia and Japan, he added.

Moreover, historical responsibility can also be directly translated into emission per capita, Rebelle said.

In particular, he said, it is important to recall that countries that initiated industrialization earlier have been reliant on coal and oil - and, thus, have had a high level of emission per capita.

Meanwhile, there has been an ongoing debate on "ecological debt" in France, he added.

This has included a reflection on France's role as a colonial power - while the country relied on timber and other natural resources from West and Central Africa to fuel its own industrialization.

"This timber (was) never paid in its real price," he said. "France has a debt towards those countries in terms of building an industrial momentum on unfair price of resources."

"We can build the same type of thinking on climate change. That's to say, CO2 emissions, CO2 accumulation on high atmosphere, some countries are more responsible than others," he said.

"Again, one simple way to visualize this is to let people know what it means by measuring emissions per capita," Rebelle added.

According to the Washington-based World Resources Institute, cumulative GHG emissions in the US between 1850 and 2006 amount to 1,125.6 tons per person - whereas each Chinese contributed only 76 tons in the same 156-year period.

He said people "cannot disconnect European responsibility to China emissions" either, as low-cost products from China have at least partly supported the European economy.

And more broadly, he added, there is an inevitable cost to be paid "if we want to exert our responsibilities as citizens of the world", in the interest of improved social and environment conditions.

But this, he noted, will affect European lifestyles - even if indirectly.

"You cannot blame China for emitting a lot (of pollution)," he said - especially given the vast number of cheap products it exports.

He acknowledged that, for many people, reducing per capita GHG emissions poses a threat to their current quality of life.

But in truth, "Westerners have to reduce their GHG emission per capita drastically, while the Chinese have to take care of not going beyond their limit," he said.

While he was dismayed at seeing the increased number of cars in Beijing, Rebelle was also intrigued to see the number of the electric bicycles on the road in China's capital.

He said he was also impressed by China's huge investment in renewable energy and its launch of innovative cities for green development.

He said a combination of sophisticated technologies and innovative social approaches could change the size and scope of consumption to lead to a low-carbon lifestyle.

"We don't have a lot of time, but we still have some time to reach this point," he said.

China Daily