U.S and Chinese Climate Commitments Will Be Difficult to Fulfill

The historic deal between China and the United States to curb greenhouse gas emissions is being hailed as a political and diplomatic breakthrough. But a close examination of the plan reveals numerous stumbling blocks to implementing the pledges made by President Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping at a Beijing summit meeting.

Under the terms of the deal, nine months in the making, the United States promises to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 26 to 28 percent by 2025, compared to 2005 levels. Previously, the United States had said it would lower emissions by 17 percent, also compared to 2005; the agreement hammered out in Beijing expands that commitment, marking the first time Obama has set emission reduction targets beyond 2020.

China, meanwhile, says it will halt the growth of its greenhouse emissions around 2030. To achieve that goal, China pledged that 20 percent of the country’s energy consumption will come from non-fossil fuels by 2030.

But according to an early review of the deal, the Chinese and American pledges will be very difficult to meet. "These targets will require major undertakings by both countries," Bob Perciasepe, president of the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, said in a statement. "In the case of the United States, the new target is pushing the limits of what can be done under existing law… [T]o go much further, we’ll ultimately need Congress to act."

Pushback from Congress began just hours after the deal was announced.

"President Obama’s agreement with China is a bad deal for hardworking American families and promises to deliver a gut punch to middle-class families harder and sooner than he vowed before the election," Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.) said in a statement. "China has promised to potentially, maybe, possibly start reducing emissions after 2030, but this is a non-binding agreement and there is little reason to believe China will blunt its economic ambitions and comply."

"The President appears to be undeterred by the American people’s clear repudiation of his policies of more regulations and higher energy costs," added House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.).

John Kemp, a Reuters market analyst, said that the pledges made in the agreement are already in line with existing goals, particularly with regard to Beijing’s September adoption of a national plan on climate change. "China has a long-standing strategy to increase the share of zero-emission resources in national electricity generation at the expense of fossil fuels, especially coal," Kemp wrote in a commentary on the deal. "China’s government has been discussing an energy and climate strategy based on emissions peaking in either 2025 or 2030; the joint announcement opts for the later target, which is easier to achieve."

By the White House’s own admission, meeting the commitments would require China to make an enormous investment in rebuilding its energy infrastructure. "It will require China to deploy an additional 800-1,000 gigawatts of nuclear, wind, solar and other zero emission generation capacity by 2030 — more than all the coal-fired power plants that exist in China today and close to total current electricity generation capacity in the United States," the White House said in a fact sheet on the deal.

The target date for the deal — 2030 — also suggests that the deal is meant to build momentum ahead of the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris, where negotiators hope to secure agreement on global emissions targets. Climate experts have long argued that China and the United States must settle their differences before such an agreement can be put in place.

"The actions they announced are part of the longer range effort to achieve the deep decarbonization of the global economy over time," the White House said in its fact sheet. "These actions will also inject momentum into the global climate negotiations on the road to reaching a successful new climate agreement next year in Paris."

Even if both sides were able to meet these pledges, Chris Hope, a climate change policy researcher and faculty member at Cambridge Judge Business School, says the effect on rising temperatures would be negligible. "[I]t appears that these agreements on their own give us less than a 1 percent chance of keeping the rise in global mean temperatures below the iconic 2 [degrees Celsius] level in 2100," Hope wrote on his blog. "Most likely the rise will be about 3.8 [degrees Celsius]."