Modeling China’s climate change policy in a post-2012 framework : on the perspective of reputation

The post-2012 world Climate Change scenario would heavily depend on China’s next steps on Climate Change Policy. The world could not coordinate their policies to slow global warming without China’s participation. However, China, the world’s largest GHG emitter with the rising energy demand, is reluctant to change its high-carbon economic development models by sticking to the concept of Climate Injustice. The Economic Cost and Climate Injustice are two major concerns Chinese government faces. This raises the issue of which approach would be most likely to stimulate and persuade China to take appropriate actions in the post-2012 climate regime. This paper seeks to provide a tentative answer to this question. It compares quantityoriented mechanisms like the Kyoto Protocol with the price-type control mechanisms such as internationally harmonized carbon taxes. It concludes that the price-type approach incorporating the perspective of state reputation could visualize the possibility that China would take new Climate Policy and low-carbon economic development models. It argues that the sticks-type policies are most unlikely to push China to take actions or adopt measures because China’s growing economic and military power, rising political influence, and increasing involvement in regional and international institutions have fundamentally affected the world system. However, since China builds up its reputation by focusing on the multilateral commitments, the reputation-based price-type control mechanism could be the Pareto Improvement that encourages China to contribute its fair share to the global climate effort. The pace and face of globalization in the 21 century will be critically influenced by whether or not some specific issues that call for collective action by countries are properly addressed. One of these big questions is to address the problem of global warming. The post- 2012 world climate change scenario would heavily depend on China’s next steps on climate change policy partly because China, the world’s largest GHG emitter with the rising energy demand, is reluctant to change its high-carbon economic development models by sticking to the concept of climate injustice. In this paper, I try to analyze the probability that China’ government would accept some substantial GHG emission cut in the near future on the perspective of state reputation: is it possible that China would take any substantial quantified emissions cut? If so, how could that be? I consider these questions in this article. The first section describes the statistics of China\u27s growing greenhouse gas emissions. The next section describes China’s government\u27s unwillingness to accept any binding international commitments to reduce the emissions substantially. The subsequent section describes the fundamental reason behind that. I then describe the reputation-based price-type control mechanism that would be the tentative approach to that issue. I close this paper with a summary of the major issues