China May Start State-Guided Carbon Market by 2014

[Ed Barrow]

Source: Bloomberg

China will likely set up a domestic market for trading carbon emissions by 2014 and hand companies “half-mandatory” targets for limiting their greenhouse gases, said a government official who oversees climate-change issues.

Authorities are drawing up rules for a market to be run by “associations” overseen by the government, Feng Shengbo, deputy director of the China Clean Development Mechanism Management Center, said in an interview.

“The government will not directly control the market but if the associations make misleading policy it’s for the government to guide them,” Feng said yesterday on the sidelines of a conference in Cologne, Germany.

...

“Part of the reason they are doing that is to get a jump on the clean-energy economy of the 21st century,” Annie Petsonk, international counsel at the Environmental Defense Fund, said on a panel at the conference today. “If America does not get its act together on this, we will be left behind.”

Read more: http://preview.bloomberg.com/news/2010-05-27/china-may-start-state-guided-domestic-carbon-market-by-2014-director-says.html

[David__77]

1. China can sacrifice some of its GDP growth for these measures.

In the long run, it will pay off economically as well as in terms of quality of life overall. GDP is not the only measure of standard of living.