Bali Result: China 1 – 0 U.S.

Those scoring the undercard match between the U.S. and China at the U.N. conference on climate change in Bali would have given it to China on points.

Beijing scored for being seen to be a constructive participant whereas Washington was seen as obstructive. China’s media has been playing up U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s comments about how China has sent a positive signal to the world over climate change. As such Beijing emerged as a leading spokesman for developing countries, especially the fast emerging economies such as itself, Brazil, India and South Korea.

Beijing also saw off U.S. attempts, mainly for domestic consumption it should be noted, to portray the view that climate change is now really China’s fault, and thus China should be pressed into accepting binding numerical targets. The Bush administration, despite its volte face on climate change earlier this year, has no great appetite for binding targets for itself, but it certainly doesn’t want to have them imposed on it but not on China. Plus, the technology, voluntary targets and energy efficiency approach it is pushing promises future business for American companies that sell green and clean technologies, so it wants China and other developing nations to have a reason — and a deadline — to buy them.

This is all geopolitical power jockeying and doesn’t change any of the underlying facts: Per capita emissions in the U.S. in 2004 were about five times higher than China and 16 times higher than India’s. However, China may by now have overtaken the U.S. as the world’s largest total emitter because of its population size, rapid growth and reliance on coal to generate electricity.

And Beijing, too, has a domestic political agenda to be seen as green that goes beyond the environmental need to make the air breathable and the water drinkable. The leadership doesn’t want to cede a power vacuum around the issue into which a future possible rival could step.

Bali High

China is a polluted place but getting less so. That according to Germanwatch, a German environment watchdog that releases an annual ranking of the most environmentally friendly industrialized and developing countries.

Its latest annual Climate Change Performance Index, which covers 56 countries that account for 90% of global carbon dioxide emissions and was released at the U.N. conference on climate change now going on in Bali, puts China at 40th, up four places from last year. For the record, the U.S. and Saudi Arabia are at the bottom of the list.

China’s advance up the ranking has caused some surprise. The report’s explanation:

It can be explained by its recently strong domestic and international engagement for renewable energy, the new climate protection regulations in the transport sector and its nowadays relatively constructive role in the UN climate negotiations.

China’s ranking also owes more to promise than performance. It scores highly on the policy-making component in the Index’s methodology, offsetting to some extent the drag of a poor trends score. Beijing has set a target of generating 10% of its energy from renewable sources by 2010, ordered some industries to cut consumption by 20% and is encouraging the countries vast bureaucracy to stop driving gas-guzzling cars. (A breakdown of China’s score is here.)

This is driven in part by old-fashioned concerns of energy security and worsening droughts, floods and air quality, with the internal political fears that raises for the government.

But China is also winning praise at the Bali conference for the constructive role it is playing in contrast to its past stance. It has taken the lead among developing countries in calling for rich nations to speed up the transfer of cleaner technologies to help shift away from fossil fuels, and for developing nations not to have hard emission-cut targets imposed on them.

As a successor to the decade-old Kyoto agreement is taking shape, China is looking the gloablist and the U.S. the obstructionist.

Warming To Climate Change

The success of the U.N’s two-week long climate conference in Bali will turn a lot on what China signs on for. The meeting is intended to get all countries working on how the world will mitigate the effects of global warming once the decade-old Kyoto agreement expires in 2012.

Kyoto was a fractious affair, with rich countries, notably the U.S., and poor ones, including China and India, shunning it because it had hard targets for cutting greenhouse gas emissions from 1990’s levels that they saw as hurting economic growth. But since then the political skeptics on climate change have become a dwindling minority in the face of hard science to the contrary and business discovering the beauty of appearing green.

It is not so much that the world’s demand for energy shows is abating. The International Energy Agency forecasts that demand will have increased by half as much again by 2030 with two thirds of the increase coming from developing nations and China accounting for a third of it. But there is a new focus, in China as much as anywhere else, on the environmental impact of consuming as much energy as the world does in the way that it does.

A lot of the groundwork for what may be achieved in Bali was done at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum (APEC) summit in Sydney in early September–a gathering that included all the main players save for the European Union. That coalesced regional support for what could be called the pro-growth camp backed by the Bush administration, which has itself done a U-turn on climate change.

This approach puts technology, voluntary targets and energy efficiency at the heart of any global agreement on climate change in a way that would contain the growth of greenhouse gas admissions but still not curtail economic growth. APEC leaders agreed to work towards a 25% reduction by 2030 in energy intensity, the amount of energy used to produce a dollar of gross domestic product. Developing countries prefer this measure to absolute cuts in carbon outputs because it puts the onus for action on the big polluters like the U.S. and China.

Yet China signed on for that deal, the first time it has agreed to quantifiable targets–albeit non-binding ones. The Sydney agreement, though, is at odds with the absolute–cut targets agreed by the leaders of the eight richest countries at the G8 summit early in the year, and those are, for the most part, the core supporters of Kyoto.

China doesn’t want Kyoto-2 to wither on the vine. There is likely to be aid money for clean technologies and to adapt to the social and economic impacts of mitigating climate change. And there is a domestic political imperative driving the need to make China’s water and air cleaner. Where Beijing decides to throw its lot will greatly shape what emerges in two weeks time from the Bali meeting.