US-China Commission Report - Fatal System Error

218
Barriers to the Transfer of Environmental Goods—Cont.
During the Doha negotiations in November 2007, the United
States and the European Union proposed a list of 43 goods, including
solar panels, boilers, and thermostats, but China and
other developing countries advocated a project-based approach
under which individual countries could identify goods as ‘‘environmental
goods’’ when included in a national project with an
environmental objective. 213 In addition to this disagreement,
Brazil desires to include biofuels (considered to be an agricultural
product) as an environmental good, although the other
goods on the proposed tariff lists are all industrial goods. The
United States and the European Union oppose this suggestion. It
appears that China may find this deadlock convenient for delaying
movement on this issue.
China is investing heavily in developing its own clean energy
technologies and may decide that protecting these nascent operations
is more important than opening its market to new technologies.
214
Conclusions
• China’s energy and environmental policy institutions are weak,
and without significant support and strengthening by the PRC
leadership, these institutions will be incapable of reversing the
trends of China’s energy consumption and environmental pollution.
• The most obvious explanation for the weakness of China’s energy
and environmental institutions is the government’s lack of commitment
to devote the necessary resources to achieving substantial
progress in these arenas. The government demonstrated in
its preparations for the Beijing Olympic Games that it has the
ability to use governmental mechanisms to develop and enforce
environmental policies to achieve its objectives—specifically improving
the quality of Beijing’s air.
• Given the transboundary environmental impact of China’s unbridled
energy consumption, the United States has a keen interest
in supporting China’s energy and environmental bureaucracy to
improve its transparency, expertise, and capacity to promulgate
and enforce regulations designed to reduce emissions and increase
energy efficiency.
• Chinese leaders are aware of the need to moderate the growth
of energy consumption and to improve energy efficiency but to
date they have not made a commitment to reduce carbon dioxide
emissions at the cost of economic development.
• China participates in multilateral negotiations to address climate
change but has major difficulty supporting an agreement that requires
it to reduce its net emissions. Chinese negotiating efforts
attempt to shift the burden to reduce emissions to developed, industrialized
nations and to escape being placed in this group.