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Kelly Sims Gallagher on China, the U.S., and Greenhouse Gas Emissions

The future environmental health of our planet hinges on the energy policy of two countries, the U.S. and China, according to Kelly Sims Gallagher. Gallagher is an adjunct lecturer in public policy and director of the project on Energy Technology Innovation Policy (ETIP) at the Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. She is the author of "China Shifts Gears: Automakers, Oil, Pollution, and Development."

Q: You see the economic and national security of the United States as being inextricably connected to China’s energy consumption — please explain why.

Gallagher: China is now the second largest energy consumer in the world, after the United States, so the two countries really have the ability to influence global energy prices, and also global environmental quality. So these two countries are connected in a way no other two countries are today.

Q: In what ways is China's energy consumption and energy policy already affecting the U.S.?

Gallagher: Most recently, China’s oil consumption has gone up dramatically and China is now the second largest consumer of oil in the world. It became the second largest consumer in 2004. One of the reasons oil prices have gone up so much in the last few years is because of this rise in Chinese oil consumption.

Still, China’s energy policy rests largely on the fact that its main energy resource is coal and so in many respects the Chinese have no choice but to confront the coal that they have. They’re working very hard on coal-to-liquid so they don’t have to rely so heavily on foreign oil. But even so, they’ve become the second largest consumer of oil and the third largest oil importer. So what that leaves them with really is only the choice to adopt really aggressive energy efficiency measures, and China has done that. China has more aggressive energy efficiency standards for automobiles than we do in the U.S. and China is moving quite quickly towards advanced coal technology. Even though they’ve made a lot of progress on renewables and efficiency, the fact remains that they are a huge country with a very fast growing economy and they’ve had a lot of challenges developing enough energy supply to meet the demand that they have in such a rapidly growing economy.

Q: We hear a lot about how countries such as China and India will increasingly have an impact on global climate disruption if current energy policies and energy technologies are not changed. How do you see the recent UN climate summit in Bali affecting policy in those regions?

Gallagher: Last year, in 2007, China surpassed the United States in becoming the largest producer of greenhouse gas emissions, which alter the global climate. This is partly because of China’s heavy reliance on coal and in this current century China will be by far the largest emitter of greenhouse gases, even though the United States was the largest emitter in the past century. These two countries will make or break the global climate in terms of their overall emissions. If they can find a way to work collaboratively to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, this issue could be solved. But if they cannot, there is really no hope given how large their total emissions are.

The summit in Bali was an important step forward especially with respect to China’s stance during the negotiations. China basically agreed to enter into discussions to develop a new agreement for reducing greenhouse gas emissions that they would take part in, in terms of mandatory reductions. And they’ve never agreed to do that before, so it’s an important shift on the part of the Chinese. We’re still waiting for the United States to agree to do something in a mandatory way and I think it’s not going to be possible for China to agree to reduce its emissions until the U.S. does.

Q: There has been what you've called a "sea-change in the politics of climate." What do you see as the optimal U.S. role, both in working directly with government and industry in countries like China and in working with the international community on energy and climate issues?

Gallagher: For more than a decade, the whole world has been waiting for the United States to commit to reduced greenhouse gas emissions. I think that sea change in the politics of global climate change is really in the United States where you now see large majorities of U.S. citizens supporting action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. I think once the United States commits to reduce overall, then the world will quickly fall into place behind the United States.

Countries like China and India are becoming very large total emitters of greenhouse gas emission, but on a per capita basis their emissions are much lower than the U.S. average. For example, an average Indian only emits one twentieth the amount of greenhouses gases as an average American, and in China it’s one fifth. So I think many of these countries have a lot of resentment about how wasteful U.S. emissions are. I think it will be difficult to ask either of those counties to do anything dramatic to reduce their emissions until the United States has done something. It would be politically almost impossible for those countries to agree to go forward if the U.S. has not already done so.

Q: As you work on solutions, what do you tell people who feel it’s already too late?

Gallagher: It’s certainly not too late to avert total global climate disruption. The recent Fourth Assessment Report of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), made it clear that we have a window of time in which we need to act in the next five to ten years. We have an opportunity to try and begin reducing emissions and if we are able to reduce emissions and start this process now, we would be able to avert catastrophic global climate change. It’s probably inevitable that we will have some change at this point, given the amount of greenhouse gases already in the atmosphere. But I think at this point the question is: can we make it a gradual change where people can adapt to it, or will it really be a dramatic, very difficult, painful change? I think there’s still plenty of time to make it a much more gradual change that we can all live with.

Reporters:

Please contact 617-495-1115 to arrange an interview with Kelly Gallagher.