U.S. and China on Carbon

Groups Press U.S. and China on Carbon
By EDWARD WONG
Published: November 3, 2009
BEIJING — Three prominent American research organizations that are pushing for greater cooperation between the Obama administration and China on the issue of climate change say the two governments should make a priority of supporting the use of carbon capture technology and the creation of a market for carbon.

The organizations, the Asia Society, the Center for American Progress and the Natural Resources Defense Council, or N.R.D.C., are putting out two separate reports this month that urge the two governments to put more money into projects in China that can better develop the technology of carbon capture and sequestration, commonly called C.C.S. The process captures carbon dioxide emissions from industrial and power plants before they enter the atmosphere and stores them underground, usually in geological formations.

President Obama is scheduled to make his first trip to China this month. He and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton have said cooperation on climate change is a new top priority in United States-China relations. But the two countries have yet to take concrete steps together on any proposals. Some environmental advocates who have been following the talks say they are growing increasingly pessimistic about the chances of serious cooperation.

Advocates also say that any hope of a meaningful result emerging from the international climate change summit meeting to take place in December in Copenhagen might depend on whether the United States and China first demonstrate that they can reach agreements among themselves.

Orville Schell, a China scholar who helped organize the writing of the Asia Society report that is co-produced with the Center for American Progress, said in an e-mail message that the report “is written to help the Obama administration have some concrete cooperative project that they can bring to Beijing.”

The three organizations stress in their reports that developing C.C.S. technology is critical to alleviating climate change because the United States and China, the two largest greenhouse gas emitters in the world, rely heavily on coal for their energy needs. Those countries are unlikely to move away from this reliance on coal and other fossil fuels anytime soon.

“Both countries will continue to depend on burning large amounts of coal for the foreseeable future, and thus, if this technology can be proven at sufficient levels of scale and safety, the deployment of C.C.S. technologies is an essential element in any effort to stabilize global greenhouse gas emissions,” the Asia Society and Center for American Progress report says. The report is scheduled to be released Wednesday.

A summary of the N.R.D.C. report, to be released this month, lists several carbon capture projects that have been started by state-owned enterprises in China, but says “more substantial funding from both the Chinese government and international sources is critical in order to deploy and improve C.C.S. technologies and thus reduce the costs involved.”

I found this article online from the New York Times. I think that it is a great idea for the two countries with the largest amount of GHG emissions to come together and brainstorm on ways to better our environment and the issues of climate change. What worries me, however, is that many organizations are pushing for new carbon capture and sequestration technology. I do agree that the government should look into providing more money towards this cause, but I think there should be much more research and tests performed on this idea especially because such a huge project (carbon capture and sequestration) could have a potentially negative result in the end, while people are focused on a temporarily positive outcome at first.