Petteri Taalas, head of the Finnish Meteorological Institute and the Finnish delegation to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), welcomes the climate-change pact announced by the Chinese and American presidents.
At a joint press conference in Beijing on Wednesday, Xi Jingping and Barack Obama unveiled ambitious targets for cutting greenhouse gas emissions. Beijing set a goal for its emissions to peak "around 2030". It is by far the world's biggest emitter of carbon dioxide, which scientists say drives climate change. Obama said the US will lower emissions to at least a quarter of 2005 levels by the year 2025.
Taalas: Modest targets
“This is extremely good news,” Taalas told Yle. “These two countries together are responsible for about half of the world’s emissions. In particular, the rapid growth of China’s emissions has been a source of concern along with the fact that the US has not been able to do anything to limit its own emissions.”
Taalas believes that China at least will be able to reach its goal.
“In regard to China, I believe that this can be accomplished. China is a state that can certainly carry out its decisions effectively,” he says. In the US, the situation is made more complex by the country’s “challenging political machinery”. Indeed, on Thursday, US Republican leader Sen. Mitch McConnell vowed to fight what he called an "unrealistic plan that...would ensure higher utility rates and far fewer jobs."
Taalas describes the actual targets as “relatively mild”.
“If we want to stay within the two-degree [Celsius global warming] target that was discussed at [UN Secretary General] Ban Ki-moon’s climate conference in September, then these goals are too modest. The EU has signalled its own path of 40 percent emissions reductions by 2030, and this is the path that would move us into a safer direction. If the US and China are unable to set stricter targets, then we’re talking at a global level of warming more than two degrees” – which most scientists agree could have catastrophic effects such as sea level rises and desertification.
Ollikainen: ‘Big 3’ ready for change
Markku Ollikainen, professor of environmental economics at the University of Helsinki, also calls the Chinese and US targets “a good start”.
“This is good news, important news,” he told Yle. “Now the three biggest polluters – the EU, the US and China – have announced that they are ready for significant emissions cuts,” Ollikainen told Yle Radio 1’s Ykkösaamu.
“The US has shown praiseworthy ambition,” he added. “I would have expected China to place its turning point five years earlier, but this is good as well.”
If an international treaty can be reached including Japan and India, that would cover the five biggest polluters, he points out.
"We know that 10 countries are responsible for 70 percent of the world's emissions and 20 for more than 80 percent. If we can get commitments from them, then we'll be able to say that we can begin to do significant work against climate change."
Demand for Finnish cleantech
Also on Ykkösaamu, Harri Lammi, Deputy Programme Director of Greenpeace Finland, was upbeat about the prospects for a global deal – and Finnish cleantech sales as China dramatically changes course.
“In China many things are difficult to achieve, but when China’s highest leadership promises something, it sticks to it. And it is pushed through,” Lammi observes.
He says that two thirds of the world’s CO2 emissions in recent years have been a result of China’s use of coal – but that China has begun to reduce coal consumption this year.
“Last year China closed steel and cement factories that had overcapacity. That reduced coal consumption. Since then they have a programme under which no new coal plants can be built in eastern China,” Lammi notes.
He also adds that China is closely watching what the EU does in regard to energy and the environment.
“There are even news about Finnish companies regularly on the website of the Chinese energy administration,” says Harri Lammi. “Finnish technology could have a big role as coal is replaced in China’s big cities.”
Lammi: Last-minute decision
As he sees it, this decision comes at the eleventh hour.
“If action is not begun right now, the repercussions for humanity will be huge. By 2030 or 2040 we won’t be able to change things anymore. Then we’ll be talking about extremely drastic changes in the forests, the drying up of the Amazon rainforest, the melting of glaciers, sea level rise, all of this would be inevitable at that point,” Lammi warns.
Indeed, most scientists agree that a UN climate treaty, to be finalized a year from now in Paris, is a final opportunity to get emissions in check before the worst effects of climate change become unavoidable.
World leaders who have been pressing for the treaty heralded the Sino-American deal, with Ban Ki-moon urging all other nations to follow Obama's and Xi's lead by announcing their own emissions targets by early next year.