Beijing would soon follow the US lead if Washington agreed to tackle its emissions in the next few years because the government took the threat of global warming more seriously than the United States, a climate expert said on Tuesday.
"My impression is that the national government top level ministry officials in China regards the threats of global warming to their country with a much higher level of seriousness than their counterparts do here the United States," said Davis Hawkins of the National Resources Defense Council, an environmental group.
If the United States agreed to cut emissions deeply with a baseline that got together over time, it would spur US manufacturers to build low-emissions technology like alternative energy and coal plants that store carbon dioxide underground. It could then market those technologies to the world, forcing Beijing to act.
"The biggest carroty is to have the US to take a leadership role," Mr. Hawkins said. "Then countries like China are going to say, ' What does the United States know that we don’t know?’ and agree to their own cuts."
Mr. Hawkins is based in Washington but visits the mainland often, meeting government ministers heading the country’s science and technology, environmental protection, agriculture and development reform agencies. He said they were concerned about the possibility that global warming would lead to drastic cuts in water for agriculture.
"They are very much aware that the Tibetan glaciers are threatened and they cannot count on the same water supply to western China from those glaciers 20, 25 or 30 years from now as they get now."
The drought possibility threatens the mainland’s food supply well as its political stability because agriculture provides jobs. "It’s a huge threat to China as a Stable growing nation," Mr. Hawkins said.
Rajendra Pacharuri, Chairman of the UN' s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, has said that a quarter of a billion people on the mainland alone could Suffer from less glacier melt from the Himalavan Hindudu Kush mountains for water supplies.
World leaders are seeking to get the biggest greenhouse gas emitters, the United States and China, to engage in a global agreement to cut output of the gases that would follow the first phase of the Kyoto Protocol, which runs out in 2012. |
