China plans to run its pilot carbon trading market for three to five years before extending it nationally. That sliver of information comes from Su Wei, the government’s chief climate negotiator, speaking at the international climate talks in Durban, South Africa to devise a successor to the Kyoto accord. As we noted ahead of those talks, two provinces, Guangdong and Hubei, and five cities, Shenzhen, Tianjin, Beijing, Chongqing and Shanghai, will comprise the initial market, which is likely to start trading in 2013. But details still remain nearly as sketchy as they were in Beijing’s recent white paper on climate change.
Meanwhile, at the same meeting, officials have indicated that Beijing could set absolute caps on its carbon emissions by as soon as 2020. This would be a significant shift from China’s position that emission reduction targets should be set in terms of energy intensity (the amount of energy used to create a unit of GDP). There is a danger of reading too much into conference comments this early, but they could imply that Beijing is preparing to take the initiative in breaking the deadlock with the U.S. over which country moves first in cutting fossil fuel emissions, and in making an early play for the capital and technology that will be needed for developing nations to develop low-carbon economies.
China Bystander 