A Look at Carbon-right Disputes

Climate change is an issue that concerns the common interest of the international community, regardless of a country’s development status. However, it’s regrettably ironic that the West still approached climate change at the Copenhagen summit with the power politics of a Cold War mindset.

With the absoluteness of “global warming” being replaced by the conceptual ambiguity of “climate change”, it has turned out that the forces pushing the world toward a climate problem are not generated from the catastrophic scenario of “global warming” drawn by scientists, but from the wrestling over a carbon-credit standard system and carbon rights that lie behind it.

As for the commodity standard, huge market scale has formed the supplying capacity of a carbon currency. Statistics from the World Bank indicate that the average growth rate of carbon trading between 2006 and 2008 exceeded 320 percent. The gross carbon trade in 2008 hit 4.8 billion tons, or $126 billion in all, more than 100 times that of 2004. It has been calculated that the annual global average trade of carbon dioxide is between 700 million and 1.3 billion tons, making a mega international carbon trade market with an annual turnover between $14 billion and $65 billion, which is likely to become the largest commodity market in the world within five years.

As far as a currency standard is concerned, binding carbon credits with currency may probably settle the reconstruction of the international currency system. The combination of economic activity and energy trading proves an important factor in deciding the status of a country’s currency, controlling the power of the most important energy in the world or whether the country has international pricing rights for the specific energy concerned. This has become the main motivator pushing a country’s rise and promoting its currency to become an international currency.

China is the most capable potential supplier in the low carbon industry chain, but is not a pricing party. Possessing the richest carbon emission resources, China has also become the largest carbon emission cutter under the CDM mechanism. As indicated by statistics from the United Nations Development Program, accounting for over 58 percent of global reductions among all registered emission reduction volume, China is the No 1 in terms of both registered numbers and absolute annual emission reduction among all countries.

However, the Renminbi has not become the pricing and settlement currency of carbon trading yet, which saddles China with austere handicaps for its lack of pricing rights in global carbon finance.

With comparatively low carbon capital efficiency, China is still short of basic carbon trade regulations, sites and platforms, let alone support for carbon finance and services. Mismatch between the development of its carbon financial system and the presumably great potential of a carbon market restricts China to a lower position in the trade chain of carbon finance.

China has to prepare for changes in advance in order to grasp the development initiative by constructing the framework of a carbon finance strategy and development, and by trading, investing and financing a market mechanism for the Renminbi in the global carbon trade.

It is almost impossible for the West to compromise with the developing world, for it is playing a lead role in the international arena by using power politics. Even if a global agreement is hammered out, it may be another unbalanced Bretton Woods System. Copenhagen is not a finishing point, but a starting line. All developing countries, including China, have to face dozens of challenges, among which is how to break the West-led carbon emission reduction system to give a push to the construction of a balanced global carbon emission reduction and carbon financial system.