Does Hu deserve the climate hype?

As my colleague Joshua Keating noted, there was a great deal of anticipation ahead of Chinese president Hu Jintao’s speech this morning at the UN climate summit in New York. U.N. climate chief Yvo de Boer, who has the at times unenviable job of cheerleading for progress in so far ho-hum international climate talks, even went so far as to say China was poised to become “a world leader on addressing climate change.”  A headline in yesterday’s Guardian fanned the flames: “China’s president expected to announce radical climate change targets.”

It would have been hard for anything Hu might have said to live up to the hype.

In a speech that lasted less than ten minutes, Hu said that China intended to include “carbon intensity” targets in its next five-year economic blueprint. Hu stressed that China is taking steps to reduce future carbon emissions, at least as compared with business as usual. China is indeed already doing much more to expand renewable energy production than many western observes give it credit for.

But has China achieved, in de Boer’s words, “front-runner” status? Well, that stretches definition.

As Julian Wong, a senior policy analyst at the Center for American Progress in Washington, DC, said: “Maybe they’re leading in specific policies, but it’s premature to say they’re a leader. Climate leader … I’m not quite sure what that would mean.”

Hu began his remarks by reiterating the principle of “differentiated” responsibilities for developed and developing countries. He didn’t make any pledges about carbon caps, or otherwise indicate a softening on China’s position going into Copenhagen. China still wants developed nations to largely foot the bill for its carbon mitigation efforts – an argument with some merit, but also many critics; in sum, hardly an open invitation to move climate talks forward.

Yet in a sense, the recent hype about China as a climate-change “leader” is less about what China is doing than about what the US isn’t doing.

The US Senate now seems unlikely to pass a climate bill before Copenhagen. Speaking to Bloomberg TV this morning, Senator John Kerry, head of the committee drafting climate legislation, now said he now hoped the Senate would begin to debate a climate bill before December – debate, not act on. Talk about lowered expectations.

And in his first full speech on climate change, delivered this morning in New York, President Obama said that “unease is no excuse for inaction,” but crucially he did not mention any emissions reduction targets or firm financial commitments. Obama’s climate speech was in a way even less remarkable than Hu’s.

The upshot is while China hardly has an undisputed claim to being the world “leader” in fighting climate change, it now seems to have pulled ahead in the global warming PR wars. That’s not a bad thing if it helps pressure Washington into action.

But it could be a bad thing if it gives China much greater leverage to set the terms of the debate and define what “success” means at Copenhagen. And unless the US steps up to the plate in the next three months, that’s exactly what will happen.