This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with Michael Davidson, a leading scholar on China’s environmental policy, who holds joint appointments at UC San Diego as an assistant professor at the School of Global Policy and Strategy and the Jacobs School of Engineering. Michael unpacks recent announcements out of Beijing, including Xí Jìnpíng’s 习近平 decision to cease all funding for coal-fired power plants outside of China, and explains the linkage between China’s push for non-fossil energy and the recent power shortages that have affected 20 provinces. He also explains China’s new emissions trading scheme, or ETS, and discusses what China still needs to do to meet the ambitious targets set by Xi Jinping last year: reaching peak carbon emissions by 2030, and achieving carbon neutrality by 2060.
3:26 – Xi Jinping’s announced end to funding for coal-fired generators outside China at UNGA
12:00 – China’s recent power outages and their relationship to emissions reduction
19:32 – The basics of China’s new emissions trading scheme
38:37 – Coercive environmentalism, command-and-control, and market instruments
47:15 – Can U.S.-China competition result in a “race to the top” in emissions reduction?
54:24 – GHG reduction and the Red New Deal
A transcript of this interview is available on SupChina.com.
Recommendations:
Michael: The Chair, a Netflix show starring Sandra Oh.
Kaiser: Bewilderment, the new novel by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Overstory, Richard Powers
Mentioned in the show: Valerie Karplus’s paper on China’s ETS; New York Times Magazine piece on The Many Saints of Newark, a Sopranos prequel.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Talking Taiwan with former national intelligence officer Paul Heer
A new U.S. strategy in East Asia, from the Quincy Institute
China's judicial decisions database and what it means
Ryan Hass on the Biden administration's China direction
Ian Johnson and Lin Yao on "liberal" Chinese Trump supporters
Historian James Carter on the final days of Old Shanghai
Veteran diplomat Evan Feigenbaum on U.S. policy in a changing Asia
China and India: Pallavi Aiyar and Ananth Krishnan on mutual misperceptions
Is coercive environmentalism the answer?
Chilies and China: Brian Dott on how a New World import defined regional cuisines in China
Jennifer Pan studied clickbait in Chinese propaganda. You won’t believe what she discovered!
Rana Mitter on the reshaping of China’s World War II legacy
A China policy for the progressive left
The wuxia storyverse of Peter Shiao
Southeast Asia in the dragon's shadow: A conversation with Sebastian Strangio
The American journalists still in China
The fight over Inner Mongolia's "bilingual education" policy
U.S.-China relations in 2020 with Susan Shirk
Online vitriol and identity with The New Yorker’s Jiayang Fan
Sinica celebrates the 500th episode of the China in Africa Podcast
Create your
podcast in
minutes
It is Free