CHINA’S NO-SHOW AT GLASGOW COP26

 

22 aspects of China’s approach that are relevant to Tibet:

1. China’s Meteorological Administration speaks with glowing approval of the increasing runoff from Tibetan glaciers, and the warming of Tibet as all good, as Tibet becomes more like China. The official China Meteorological Administration says of climate change across Tibet: “it is not so dry and cold, the lake area is larger, and even the once green Gobi has begun to grow green. With a warmer and wetter climate, the ecological environment of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau has been improved. Plateau area is greener, the air is more humid, the production of forage grass increases, the living space of wild animals is expanded, and the plateau looks “more beautiful”.  China sees climate change as a dividend.
2. China’s 14^th Five Year Plan names geoengineering cloud seeding as a technology to be used more intensively to force clouds to rain over the upper Yellow River catchment. If this dubious technology, using melted silver iodide to make clouds coalesce into raindrops, actually works, all that will be accomplished is to deprive the UNESCO World Heritage site, Hoh Xil, of its summer monsoon rain, since Hoh Xil is even further inland than the uppermost Yellow River catchment, as the clouds drift in from the Indian and Pacific Oceans.
3. Far more dangerous than carbon emissions are chemicals used industrially as spray foam sealants and refrigerants. These hydrofluorocarbons are meant to banned, period. The Montreal Protocol, a separate agreement, not part of UNFCCC, banned their production decades ago, because they float up to the upper atmosphere where they destroy the ozone layer that stops ultraviolet radiation from the Sun from hitting us. UV causes genetic mutations that lead to cancer, not only in humans but all sentient creatures. Montreal is usually held up as a highly successful treaty, in contrast to UNFCCC and its slow progress, but China persists in making and exporting those ozone destroying chemicals, and meetings of the Montreal Treaty do nothing more than approvingly note that China says, yet again, it is cracking down on illegal manufacturing. Exposes by Environment Investigations Agency show it is still happening. On 8 December 2021, as the Glasgow COP is at mid point, the Montreal Protocol is meeting to try yet again to get central Asian countries to do more to pinpoint those fugitive Chinese HCFC emissions that cause an ozone hole above the Third Pole, Tibet, an issue no-one talks about.
4. China’s decarbonisation goals explicitly name pumped hydro as a technology to turn to as an alternative to coal and gas fired power generation. Tibet is the prime location for pumped hydro, a different kind of dam to those currently under construction or built already in Tibet. Pumped hydro, already in place at sacred Yamdrok Yumtso south of Lhasa, works by pumping water uphill in hours when electricity demand is not peaking, then releasing the water (at Yamdrok Yamtso back down to the Yarlung Tsangpo below) to drive the turbines that make electricity in peak hours. The idea is that pumped hydro is capable of evening out the disparity between when electricity is needed by consumers, and when it is generated by wind turbines and solar panels. In effect pumped hydro is a battery, storing water to be used to make electricity when the demand peak hits. Since other battery technologies just aren’t up to such scale, China has named pumped hydro as the way to go. That means lots more dams in Tibet, just at a time when it has been looking like China’s enthusiasm for massive dams was fading- too expensive, take too long to build, wind and solar much cheaper. China’s core policy statement for this COP 26 states: “Accelerate the large-scale application of pumped storage and new energy storage.”  (section 5.12)
5. Jetstream: Tibet is at such altitude it routinely deflects the jetstream to the south of the plateau in summer and to the north of the plateau in winter. Now those wavy meanderings of the Jetstream are impacting the entire northern hemisphere, igniting wildfires, cold snaps and floods. The Tibetan Plateau is a major driver of the planetary wave resonance that increasingly causes heatwaves, droughts and floods, due to the slowing and wandering of the jet stream. Tibet is crucially important.
6. Food security throughout Asia is based on the annual monsoon cycle, which is driven by the seasonal heating of the Tibetan Plateau. Already those monsoon rains are becoming more erratic, due to measurable climate change. Tibet matters.
7. Tibet experiences rapid climate change that damages glaciers, causes floods and lakes overtopping, melts permafrost, compromises livelihoods and dries wetlands essential to the East Asian flyway routes of seasonally migrating birds, threatening extinction. Yet warmer and wetter, from China’s point of view, makes Tibet more like China, which is good.
8. Although Tibet and the Tibetans in no way caused the rapid rise in methane emissions, in rainfall, ozone hole above Tibet or the rising runoff from Tibetan rivers, China, immediately downstream, harvests a dividend of extra runoff, at least as long as it may take for the glaciers to disappear in coming decades.
9. China for many years has insisted it remains a developing country, thus exempt from taking effective action to actually halt climate heating. As a result we are now in a time when only adaptation is possible, mitigating and slowing the ongoing rise in global temperature. Experience worldwide is that the local communities most directly impacted by climate heating  are best able to do the work of mitigation, if properly resourced and financed.
10. On the ground in Tibet local community climate adaptation means repopulating wetlands and water meadows drained by Chinese ditch digging interventions, to regrow reeds essential to migrating birds, regulate and purify water flow. Climate adaptation means appointing local leaders as “river chiefs” empowered to undo the damage done by past top down policy failures.
11. On the ground in Tibet local community cooperatives need resources and authority to regulate herd grazing pressure to ensure sustainability, rather than top down diktats on carrying capacity and herd size. Mobility matters.
12. On the ground Tibetans need to be released at last from having to poison burrowing rodents which aerate soil, yet are officially blamed for soil degradation. Local communities best understand local ecosystem dynamics, the role of keystone species, ways of encouraging mingling of wild and domestic herds across unfenced lands, in contrast to official polices requiring fencing, poisoning, blame, exclusion and punishment. Tibet is immediately upriver, upwind and upland of China, a provider of ecosystem services on a huge scale, yet Tibetans are not compensated for the opportunity cost incurred by foregoing development, in order to continue provisioning of ecosystem services beneficial to China.
13. Depopulating Tibet of its landscape custodians and livestock producers weakens Tibetan food security, in direct contravention of China’s national food security policies, and human rights embedded in the Sustainable Development Goals. On the ground in Tibet local communities, building on thousands of years of sustainable landscape management, should be empowered to be in charge of national parks.
14. China is the world’s biggest emitter of climate heating gases, the biggest maker by far of steel, aluminium, copper and other metals, consumes more coal than the rest of the world combined, yet makes no commitment to any reduction in emissions, until 2030, well after other countries have started go decarbonise.
15. China imports from Tibet enormous quantities of clean water, clean air, minerals and electricity, yet Tibetans are marginalised, silenced, racially stigmatised and not acknowledged as providers of ecosystem services.
16. China says it wants to get to net zero emissions by 2060, a full decade later than any other country. Net zero does not at all mean no emissions. China plans to be as wealthy as any of the rich nations, by target date 2049; inevitably that means high consumption of every resource the planet can provide. Carbon emissions will persist, especially in industries where there are no alternatives, such as shipping and air travel. Net zero means somewhere, way outside the cities has to make up for those emissions by being a carbon sink. That is what China has planned for Tibet; to repurpose most of the entire plateau as national park, with no ongoing human use other than mass tourism destination management.
17. Right now China is rapidly increasing coal mining for electricity generation, the opposite of what it says it intends long term. The Climate Action Tracker rates China’s climate commitments as “highly insufficient.” If China continues on its current path we are headed for a global temperature rise of three degrees.
18. China’s plans to generate more electricity from renewables is heavily dependent on Tibet for not only water but also hydropower, solar power and wind power, and the power grids that export electricity from Tibet to the world’s factory on the distant Chinese coast, using copper mined in Tibet to make the power transmission cables.
19. China’s emissions trading scheme is moribund, failing to set a meaningful price on carbon, thus no payments for ecosystem services reach the rural Tibetan local communities who do the actual work of ecosystem equilibrium maintenance.
20. China persists with economic stimulus payments that incentivise and subsidise fossil energy intensive investments, inconsistent with effective action, in this decade, to make net zero by 2060 feasible. China plans to further intensify urbanisation, which further extracts water and resources from remote areas to feed city demand. China is officially committed to attaining equality of wealth and consumption equal to the richest nations, which is unsustainable, imposing on the whole planet a footprint that is unbearable.
21. China plans to rely on non-existent technologies such as carbon sequestration to reduce emissions, while persisting with coal burning on a staggering scale far into the future.
22. China is heavily reliant on blah blah blah market-based schemes to mitigate emissions, with almost no evidence that they achieve anything. Yet local communities in remote areas who do sequester more carbon by ceasing their grazing and losing land tenure security, are required to end rural life permanently, to guarantee long term monetary value of carbon credits purchased by emitters.

HOW DID WE GET HERE?

The backstory is a sad story. Here’s the background:

Climate scientists and activists say most of the past annual UN Framework Convention on Climate Change COPs have been a failure.

The very fact that Glasgow is the 26^th annual meeting of all the world’s governments, and still we have only a Framework agreement, no accountability, no mandatory targets, not even agreed standards for measuring emissions,  tells you COP after COP has failed.

However, all governments try to sound decisive, committed, upbeat, so only a few of the failed COPs are widely recognised as failures.

Topping the list of recognised failures was the 2009 Copenhagen COP. China flatly refused to budge from saying the entire climate issue was caused by the industrialised nations, and China, as a developing country, bears no responsibility or liability, nor need it invest in climate mitigation, in fact the rich countries owe China multi billions for climate clean up.

China came to realise its Copenhagen stance was a PR fail, and has been saying the lesson to be learned is to proactively shape the discourse, with a positive message. That is what we are now seeing unroll in Glasgow: lots of positive slogans, which conceal alarming realities, and need decoding.

But first, back to those other COPs. Even the most successful, Paris 2015, failed in several ways:

1. The basic architecture of the 1992 Kyoto Protocol remains in place, sharply differentiating the responsibilities of developed and developing countries, with China sticking firmly to its outdated categorisation as a developing country. Hence China’s favourite slogan: common but differentiated responsibilities.
2. Paris 2015 failed to produce any agreed targets beyond aiming globally at a temperature rise of two degrees, which on analysis after Paris turned out to add up to actually 2.7 degrees, while the scientists have long argued that once temperature rises more than 1.5 degrees, you get a tipping point where it all spirals out of control, and effective human action then becomes impossible. Ostensibly, Glasgow is all about locking in actions that achieve a heating of no more than 1.5 degrees.
3. Paris reached agreement only by letting each country set its own target, called an NDC -Nationally Determined Contribution. At Paris all countries submitted their NDC, and agreed to do so again five years hence, which is Glasgow now. China at the last minute just prior to the Glasgow COP did submit an NDC, which is no advance on previous statements, despite the pressure to lift ambitions and deliver outcomes. Xi Jinping is not attending the Glasgow summit in person.
4. COPs since Paris 2015 were dedicated to tech stuff including reaching agreement on how emissions are measured, in order to reach a uniform standard. Since carbon isn’t the only emission that heats the atmosphere, and different pollutants affect the air differently, and persist in the air for different periods, agreement on measurement is important. China blocked any agreement. China has taken every opportunity to reject any agreed standard of measurement.
5. At Paris China fudged its emissions reduction pledge by defining it as reducing carbon use per unit of GDP, not the same thing as actual tonnage emissions reduction at all.

Having learned from Copenhagen COP 2009 that reputational damage is real damage, China has been pumping its ecological civilisation discourse, cranking up in 2020 with Xi Jinping’s pledge to somehow get to net zero by 2060, a full decade later than just about everyone else, plus a pledge to start reducing carbon emissions by 2030.

These announcements were greeted by almost everyone as a wonderful breakthrough, China was universally praised for becoming one of the good guys, even a world leader.

In reality, the 2030 emissions pledge had been made before. What it means is that until 2030 China’s emissions will continue to rise, and fall only after the decade in which the scientists say we must drastically reduce emissions. China’s pledge in no way matches what is needed.

Xi Jinping also got rave reviews for pledging no more coal fired power stations would be built around the world as Belt & Road projects. But coal fired power is still being built in China, even as some of the dirtiest and least efficient plants are closing.

The gap between China’s vague, hard to quantify pledges, and what is needed, remains huge.

China remains committed to further urbanising, which means more carbon use and extraction of minerals; likewise China’s official goal is that by 2049 it will be as rich as the richest of countries worldwide, totally unsustainable global footprint incompatible with carbon net zero. Very few analysts connect the dots.