Climate action gets caught up in US-China tensions
Janice Lim &
Wong Pei Ting
GEOPOLITICAL tensions between the United States and China have slowed the cross-border flow of low-carbon solutions, making it tougher for Singapore to work on bilateral deals related to various aspects of the green economy.
Benedict Chia, director-general of climate change at the National Climate Change Secretariat, said on Wednesday (Jun 7): “(This) has made it more challenging for some of these solutions to be deployed at scale, and at a lower cost. So cost has definitely gone up, supply chains have definitely been affected. So that’s something that we need to grapple with.”
He was a panellist at the GenZero climate conference, an event on the sidelines of the Ecosperity Week 2023, an annual sustainability conference organised by Temasek for business leaders, policy makers, investors and civil society to discuss what needs to be done for the planet, businesses and communities.
Singapore often collaborates with other countries through government-to-government contacts on areas such as hydrogen, carbon capture and storage, public-transport solutions, renewable energy trade and carbon markets.
But Chia said that although the geopolitical conflict has affected these negotiations, he is seeing greater willingness among corporations to diversify their value chains and to look for alternatives.
“So yes, it’s challenging. But we also see opportunities, and we are working with many of these players to unlock and realise some of these opportunities out there,” he added.
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Another panellist, Nathaniel Keohane, president of the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, pointed out that when Barack Obama was US president, the US and China had used the climate crisis as a landing zone for cooperation. The two sides initially worked together on phasing out hydroflourocarbons in 2013, which paved the way for more cooperation.
The tenor of bilateral ties has shifted completely since then, to one that is looking at competition with China, he noted.
But Angela Churie Kallhauge, executive vice-president for the Impact Environmental Defense Fund, reminded the audience at the panel discussion that there is also a need to focus on the dynamics among the other 195 countries outside the US and China.
One example is how the European Union’s (EU) relationship with the African continent has been affected by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The outbreak of war disrupted gas supplies going from Russia to Europe, forcing Europe to reconsider going back to burning coal for energy – the very energy source the EU had been pressuring Africa to stop relying on.
Coal, the burning of which has been vilified as a source of greenhouse gases, now finds itself in a grey area.
Kallhauge said: “I think we are going to see different types of coalitions of solutions. I think there are good prospects to identify solutions that are not necessarily the mainstream.”
Tech versus nature-based solutions
In a separate session, physicist Tom Chi, who founded planet-positive venture capital firm At One Ventures, took aim at the market’s growing preference for technology-based methods of removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere over nature-based ones, because of the relative ease of calculating their impact.
Technology-based methods include enhanced oil recovery (the process of injecting carbon dioxide into existing oil fields) and direct air capture (the use of chemical reactions to pull carbon dioxide out of the air). Nature-based solutions focus on conserving and restoring natural ecosystems, such as by reforestation and restoration of wetlands.
Chi said at the panel: “We say ‘nature-based’ is unreliable, and enhanced oil recovery is reliable. But I think that’s a failure for us, because we are going with the solution that is most easily financially closed.”
Earlier, in a presentation, he noted that Occidental Petroleum’s planned billion-dollar direct air-capture plant looks set to sequester 100 times more carbon than all 19 direct air-capture plants now in operation.
However, he added, the costly plant is actually doing the work of about 200 beavers. The beaver can become a “real, substantial partner” because it does a lot to expand natural wetlands at effectively no cost, he noted. Tapirs work similarly to restore nature. These black-and-white mammals deposit seeds in burned forests, helping rainforests to bounce back from fires.
But the problem with existing nature-based solutions is that way more money will be spent on measurement, reporting and verification than beavers spend solving the problem, he noted.
“We either need to get to better models or be able to just move forward in good faith, believing that nature will do a lot of this stuff and then measure it post facto, as opposed to pre-pricing it and being super cautious,” he said.
He then proposed: “Maybe you set it up as a mechanism where you set a low bar for how much it’s likely to sequester. If nature surpasses it, then you get paid out a lot more. That’ll probably be fine. Then nobody is scared that I got into credits that won’t be worth enough.”
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