PD Editorial: Free markets, emissions and China

The irony of China’s climate plan is hard to miss.

As journalist Elizabeth Kolbert wrote for the New Yorker: “The leader of China - nominally, at least, a Communist country - came to Washington and announced that his government was adopting a market-based approach to curbing carbon emissions. Meanwhile, to reduce its carbon emissions, the unreservedly capitalist U.S. of A. is relying on regulations issued by a centralized bureaucracy.”

There are good reasons to be skeptical that China, the world’s biggest source of greenhouse gases, will fulfill all of President Xi Jinping’s promises.

Unfortunately, there’s little reason to believe that congressional Republicans and their allies in the oil and coal industries will be any more receptive to Xi than they have been to the pope, the president or science.

Make no mistake, there’s a lot more than ideology at stake.

As the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned last year: “Continued emission of greenhouse gases will cause further warming and long-lasting changes in all components of the climate system, increasing the likelihood of severe, pervasive and irreversible impacts for people and ecosystems.”

The issue isn’t whether climate change is real or to what degree it’s a result of human activities. It’s past time to begin reducing emissions of heat-trapping gases if we’re to prevent a cataclysmic rise in temperatures.

Chinese inaction has been a handy excuse in Congress for failing to act more aggressively on America’s greenhouse gas emissions.

That already was wearing thin last fall when President Barack Obama and Xi signed an agreement committing China to capping its carbon emissions by 2030, if not sooner, and sharply increasing its use of renewable energy sources.

Xi followed up with his announcement Friday at the White House committing China to adopting a nationwide cap-and-trade system by 2017.

Under such a system, the government sets a limit on the release of greenhouse gases and issues or auctions emission permits to utilities, oil refiners and other polluting industries. The emissions limit is ratcheted down over time, and permits can be bought and sold in an open market as needed. Companies that adopt new technology or otherwise reduce their emissions can offset any costs by selling excess allowances.

Cap and trade has a track record of success.

In the 1980s, the Reagan administration used cap and trade to phase out leaded gasoline. President George H.W. Bush proposed cap-and-trade rules to reduce sulfur emissions from coal-fired power plants that cause acid rain, and Congress included it in a 1990 update of the Clean Air Act. California is currently using cap-and-trade to reduce carbon gas emissions, as are several other states and the European Union.

Congress rejected a cap-and-trade plan for greenhouse gases during Obama’s first term.

A deal with China doesn’t seem likely to move GOP representatives who found their leader, Speaker John Boehner, insufficiently conservative. But it might improve the chances of success at the global climate conference that convenes next month in Paris.

Who knows, if cap-and-trade works in China, Beijing’s capitalists might try to export the idea to the United States.