On Tuesday, world leaders will meet to discuss climate change. A while back, Michael Bechtel and Kenneth Scheve did a survey “to find out what features of an agreement were important to the public.” The results:
But it’s hard to reach such a deal when some big names aren’t attending this week’s climate summit:
Notably, Chinese President Xi Jinping and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi are skipping the event. In empirical terms, it’s hard to think of two more important leaders in the world right now: Together they lead more than 2.5 billion people, more than a third of the world’s population.
And the two countries are not only the first and second most populous countries on Earth; research shows they also were the first- and third-biggest producers of carbon dioxide emissions (the United States holds the No. 2 spot). That figure can only partly be explained away by their huge populations: One study showed that per capita emissions from China recently surpassed that of the European Union, and India is predicted to follow suit in five years.
Alden Meyer downplays the absences:
Take China: Just recently, Chinese leaders announced that a national carbon emissions trading program would begin in 2016, building on the experience gained through the seven regional programs now underway. While China remains the world’s largest emitter, the nation’s emissions intensity, which is the amount of emissions produced for each unit of GDP growth, has declined. And just last week, China’s State Council put forward the draft version of a new law to crack down on air pollution from coal burning, which severely affects Chinese citizens’ health. China will be represented at the New York Summit next week by Vice Premier Zhang Gaoli, who will be the most senior Chinese official to attend a climate talk since the 2009 Copenhagen climate conference. He is expected to elaborate on China’s plans to put limits on its consumption of coal, which is the source of some 80 percent of the country’s carbon emissions.
Dave Roberts agrees that the changes to China’s coal policy could be a “a Big F’in Deal.” But India is another story. Rebecca Leber explains:
Several recent comments made by [Prime Minister Narendra] Modi suggest little commitment to global warming, by implying it is a natural phenonemon. “We should also ask is this climate change or have we changed. We have battled against nature. That is why we should live with nature rather than battle it,” Modi said, in a departure from stronger remarks on climate action Indian officials made in 2011.
Regardless, Bloomberg View’s editors hope that some good will come from the meeting:
A particular focus will be cities, which produce 70 percent of global greenhouse-gas emissions. Many have set their own targets for cutting them and have announced specific measures to that end. In some cases, they’re aiming to improve on the targets set by their respective national governments. (Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg is founder and majority owner of Bloomberg LP, and the UN’s special envoy for cities and climate change.)
The point isn’t to reduce the costs of carbon pollution in their neighborhoods: A ton of carbon released in one place does the same harm to the planet, climate-wise, as a ton released anywhere else. Rather, it’s to show that stronger measures are no great burden. Cities can take them in stride.
The Dish 