In the fight against global warming, Jonathan Cohn sees room for cooperation:
In recent years, the Chinese have imposed fuel mileage and appliance efficiency standards, similar in many respects to those in the U.S. Just this week, officials in Beijing announced that the government would be taking another 5 million aging cars off the nation’s road. China has also set up pilot versions of tradable pollution permits—in other words, “cap-and-trade” schemes—for various industries. Officials say they hope to make these nationwide soon. And one reason the Chinese government was so eager to sign that massive new deal with Russia, allowing the import of natural gas, was because it’s desperate to find alternatives to coal. “For a long time, opponents [of new regulations] said we’ll get hoodwinked, because China won’t do anything,” says David Doniger, director of the Climate and Clean Air Program at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “That’s just not true.”
China’s behavior may seem surprising. It shouldn’t. China has a major air pollution problem, causing all kinds of very immediate and very tangible health and economic problems. Efforts to reduce the sources of these noxious particles dovetail naturally with efforts to reduce carbon emissions.
Gwynn Guilford points out that China is already sacrificing economic growth to combat pollution:
[R]ecent analysis of economic data by Wei Yao, an economist at Société Générale, found that “Chinese policymakers are getting serious about air pollution.” So serious, in fact, that those efforts are already hurting GDP performance—something the government has so far shown to be its biggest priority. Yao says GDP will slow 0.35 percentage points cumulatively from 2014 to 2017 because of air pollution mitigation efforts, and she expects the economy to take the biggest blow this year.
Kate Galbraith rattles off reasons why eliminating pollution is such a priority for China:
Beyond individuals’ physical and mental health, the pollution fiasco matters because China wants to transition its cities to modern, service-oriented economies filled with software entrepreneurs, health experts, and international financiers. “Under the old plan, where China’s get-rich plan was based on dirty manufacturing,” environmental concerns didn’t matter, says Matthew Kahn, a professor at UCLA’s Institute of the Environment and Sustainability.
Now, China wants to send manufacturing inland and lure Davos and Silicon Valley types to its big coastal cities. But such people have choices, says Kahn, and Beijing’s allures of cuisine and culture, universities and government, will matter far less if people are afraid for themselves and their children. Even Shanghai, thought to be cleaner than Beijing, suffered its own Airpocalypse in December, a few months after the government grandly established a Shanghai Free Trade Zone to woo the foreign financial sector.
The Dish 