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Speaking at a meeting of large polluters in Washington intended to deliver progress ahead of international talks in Copenhagen later this year, Li Gao said China should not pay for emissions arising from the manufacture of goods that are exported for use in rich nations.
Speaking to the BBC, Li said any successor to the Kyoto Accord agreed in Copenhagen should recognize that rich countries are indirectly responsible for a large chunk of China's carbon emissions.
"We produce products and these products are consumed by other countries, especially the developed countries," he said. "This share of emissions should be taken by the consumers but not the producers."
According to a recent study by Oslo's Centre for International Climate and Environmental Research, China may now be the world's largest emitter of carbon dioxide, but around a third of its emissions are the result of manufacturing goods for export.
Environmental groups have repeatedly called on the West to take greater responsibility for emissions that result from global supply chains, urging firms to work with suppliers in countries such as China and India to reduce their carbon emissions.
However, negotiators from the European Union and U.S. are highly skeptical that a deal can be reached in Copenhagen that would see rich nations take financial responsibility for emissions released outside of their national boundaries.
E.U. climate negotiator Artur Runge-Metzger told the BBC that nations importing goods from China would only agree to take responsibility for their carbon emissions if they were also given "jurisdiction and legislative powers in order to control and limit those [emissions]" – something he predicted China would be unwilling to hand over.
In a further indication of the distance that remains between developed nations and large emerging economies such as India and China, Li warned that any attempt to place a carbon tariff on goods imported from countries that do not sign up to binding emission targets would be a "disaster."
Negotiators have been debating how to ensure firms operating in territories with increasingly stringent carbon regulations remain competitive with international rivals operating under more lax regulatory environments.
One proposal is to impose tariffs on goods imported from countries that fail to sign up to any Copenhagen deal.
Last week, Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown said that he had discussed the possible inclusion of such "border equalization" measures in Barack Obama's planned climate change bill with Democrat leaders.
Speaking at an event hosted by the Worldwatch Institute, he said that measures were required to ensure U.S. firms are not put at a disadvantage as a result of a cap-and-trade scheme that puts a price on carbon.
"If a U.S. company - say a steel mill in Ohio - if their cost goes up dramatically for cutting carbon, it's one more reason to think they're not going to be competitive," he said. "We need some guarantee that my state will not be overwhelmed by the costs [of a climate change bill]."
"Flag" -- CC licensed by Flickr user christopher.vanbelle.
Responsibility for Imports' Carbon Footprint
So, the opportunity for Copenhagen is to outline the global mechanism for incorporating the externalised environmental cost of all products. This implies a global system of life-cycle analysis. As with national schemes, such as the UK's carbon trust, this could begin with the biggest single players first. Support and comliance by multinationals would make it easier (and they've been saying we'll do it if we have a level playing field). Perhaps we will see something along the lines of new global regulatory bodies emerge from the G20 summit in London this week. Can Copenhagen get the ball rolling on global environmental regulatory bodies?
China Demands West Takes Responsibility for Imports' Carbon Foot
The suggestion that the West should pay for the carbon emissions created by its demand for product makes sense.
We have the IT, much of technology and the platforms to effectively tax the carbon embedded in everything we buy. If we tax the carbon at the point of consumption, we create an even playing field, we generate revenue at the point of consumption, filling state or federal coffers and changing the behavior of the consumer.
We can use market forces creatively to select the cleanest technologies, thereby redirecting the consumers' attention to the better and cleaner makers of the things we need and want. If manufacturing companies don't want to "clean-up" - no matter where they are, they'll lose market.
The orginizations, IT tech and systems are available. Once again, "political will" is keeping us from moving forward.
Political will is not just government, but the political will of the few global businesses who are in the enviable position to drive this approach into reality, very quickly.
In the end, the environment would win, the governments would get revenues now whlie reducing future costs (risks) and the market would get a surge in new technologies (READ - Jobs)
I would be happy to elaborate, with serious interested parties...
JohnPaul Kusz
Associate Director
The Center for Sustainable Enterprise
Stuart School of Business, IIT
Chicago, Illinois
We Should All Pay for Carbon Emissions
China is correct in suggesting that the West pay for the carbon emissions of the products it buys. Until the true costs of production, including resource extraction, carbon emissions, and disposal solutions, are incorporated into the goods we purchase, our economic system will not find a sustainable balance.
Read more in my "We Should All Pay for Carbon Emissions" post at http://mattcourtland.wordpress.com/
United Nations treaty takes 'Nations' as its basic unit
The United Nations exists to create a forum for dialogue between sovereign Nation States. From peacekeeping to environmental policy all UN activity is predicated on the basis of the Nation as the primary unit. As such, Kyoto and the UNFCCC are based on emissions produced within the territorial area of Nations. This has excluded all non-national areas from any consideration, such as emissions from aviation or shipping that take place in international airspace and international waters. This has led to a tragic lack of global management of ecological vital systems, the oceans and the atmosphere, which must now be brought into consideration in any global environmental policy.
This Chinese proposal may help lower their territorial emissions, but the consequence (within perhaps a decade) would surely be that the west would stop buying dirty manufactured products from China for newer, cheaper and cleaner manufacturing elsewhere, as this would rapidly lower their emissions. Perhaps North Africa would become the new clean industrial hub given all that solar energy there and close proximity to European markets and shipping lanes. That's not to say that this won't happen anyway, but the Chinese proposal to shift attention from emissions source (within their Nation) draws attention to the fact that the UN was established in an age of national isolation, not today's global interconnectivity.
A more daring suggestion that gets to the heart of the matter is the Kyoto 2 proposal, put forward by Oliver Tickell. This suggests that corporations or governments concerned with the initial mining of hydrocarbon fuels should be the focus, so oil producing nations (and their associated corporations) and coal mining companies would be the ones liable to caps on production, rather than the end customers of those systems (the power stations, or the vehicles) being liable for the emissions resulting from the combustion of those hydrocarbons.
Either way, global supply chains must become decarbonised. The Copenhagen treaty, or any other regulatory or commercial initiative, is merely a tool to achieve that end.