Top China think tank proposes greenhouse gas plan

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BEIJING (Reuters) - A top Chinese state think tank has proposed a global greenhouse gas trading plan to reflect the different historic emissions of rich and poor nations, indicating deepening discussion in Beijing about climate change policy.

Researchers from the State Council Development Research Center, which advises China’s leaders, laid out the plan in the March issue of the Economic Research Journal, a Chinese-language journal published on March 20 that reached subscribers this week.

The broad scheme is far from being government policy but illustrates the growing focus of decision makers here on how Beijing should handle climate change negotiations aimed at sealing a new global pact by late 2009.

Separately, a new report from the Chinese Academy of Sciences proposes the nation’s total emissions of the main greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, peak between 2030 and 2040 and then stabilize and fall, helped by international technological and funding support, the official Guangming Daily reported on Wednesday.

China is now widely believed to have clearly passed the United States in annual emissions of carbon dioxide from industry, farming and land clearance.

Beijing faces calls from other governments for clearer commitments to minimize and reduce such greenhouse gases, which scientists say are dangerously heating the atmosphere.

The Beijing think tank’s plan seeks a solution to the divide between developed nations, with high per capita accumulations of greenhouse gas emissions, and developing nations, including China, with low levels of per capita emissions that are set to rise in coming decades.

China’s 1.3 billion people currently emit about 4 tons per person in greenhouse gases, compared with the United States at about 20 tons per person.

The answer, the think tank says, is to set emissions rights for each country, based on historic accumulation, and then let nations trade portions of those rights in an international market.

“If every country’s emissions rights can be clearly defined and strictly protected, and a corresponding mechanism for market transactions can be established, emissions reductions will become a form of behavior that offers a return,” they write.

RIGHT TO DEVELOP

The Beijing think tank’s proposal would draw China and other poorer countries into clearer obligations to curtail greenhouse gases in the long term.

But would give their citizens larger emissions quotas than rich countries’ populations, reflecting the developing world’s low historic emissions and “right to develop.”

Under the current Kyoto Protocol, the U.N.-backed pact governing countries’ climate change obligations, China and other developing economies do not have caps on greenhouse gases.

The United States previously cited China’s lack of caps as one reason for Washington staying out of the protocol’s obligations.

President Barack Obama is pushing Congress to develop a system that would cap greenhouse gas emissions and require that companies purchase permits to release such gases.

But his administration and other Western powers will still press China, India, Brazil and other big developing nations to offer clearer commitments in the successor pact to Kyoto, which negotiators hope to settle in Copenhagen in December.

The Beijing think tank said its plan would help surmount the current protocol’s shortcomings, including its “narrow coverage and lack of incentives for developing countries.”

The plan says all countries should develop an “historic account” of past emissions. That account would be used to measure whether current emissions fall above or below appropriate levels calculated from population, accumulated emissions and total global reduction objectives.

Each country would then hold a national account projecting future annual emissions entitlements up to a set date — the authors offer 2050 as an example. How countries keep emissions within agreed levels would then be left to governments to decide.

Countries could then “engage in international trading in greenhouse gas emissions rights,” with the condition that, by the set date, they have wiped out their “emissions rights deficit.”