China’s efforts to shift away from coal will be blunted by the country’s growing carbon footprint overseas, argues Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz.
Climate change is now firmly at the top of the agenda, especially in China.
The world’s largest polluter wants to become an example of a less carbon-intensive economy, one which embraces renewable energy, makes the transition away from coal and has the capacity to capture carbon instead of emit it.
But can China ‘decarbonise’ its economy, and what does cutting carbon domestically mean for the rest of the world?
According to the 2001 winner of the Nobel Prize for Economics, Joseph Stiglitz, there is a certain dilemma regarding China’s role in moving towards a low-carbon economy, especially given its deeper engagement with Latin America, the new frontier for the reproduction of Chinese capital.
Latin America will be the target of massive investments, to the tune of US$250 billion (1.55 trillion yuan) over the next decade, Chinese President Xi Jinping promised in January.
“I see that the Chinese Government is very committed to climate change at the national level. But they are also committed to development. This is one of the tensions. China has worked to reduce emissions within the country with some success, but just increasing the GDP causes more emissions,” said Stiglitz at a scientific conference on climate change in Paris earlier this month.
Two thousand researchers attended the conference held at UNESCO’s headquarters entitled Our Common Future Under Climate Change, and were keen to report their findings in advance of the United Nations Conference on Climate Change (COP21), which will be held in Paris at the end of the year.
For the complete article, please see China Dialogue.
French environment minister Nicolas Hulot has resigned live on national radio in a surprise move that will come as a blow to president Emmanuel Macron’s green credentials. Nicolas Hulot had not made the French president aware of his decision to quit, he told radio presenters, adding his time in office had been an ‘accumulation of disappointments’.
Liberia’s largest palm oil producer, Golden Veroleum Liberia (GVL) pulls out of the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) – how can rural communities cope with the impacts? The forests near GVL’s Liberian plantations are not only sacred sites of the region's people but also heavily populated with chimpanzees, leopards, pygmy hippopotamus and forest elephants which are significant not only to the local ecosystem but globally.
Mine closures have caused social and political turmoil in many regions, for example in South Africa. But there are ways of planning and managing the phase-out so that when the inevitable happens, people are better prepared. A new study looks at opportunities beyond mining and finds that infrastructure that supports mining can also be put to new use.
Population pressure, a lack of economic opportunities, environmental degradation, and new forms of travel are contributing to human displacement and unsafe migration on an unprecedented scale. And as millions more people see climate change erode their livelihoods, the problem will get worse in the absence of visionary global leadership.