China is taking steps to tackle its huge carbon output. Today, the country announced the details of its first carbon trading program, which will begin in the city of Shenzhen next month. The southern city is one of seven cities and provinces, including Beijing, which will take part in the pilot program, set to be completely implemented by 2014.

And according to one local news source, China could implement an absolute, nation-wide cap on its carbon emissions by 2016. China’s 21st Century Business Herald reported this week that the country’s State Council still needs to approve the carbon cap proposal submitted by the National Development and Reform Commission, a government entity that controls much of the Chinese economy. The proposal, which the State Council is reportedly likely to support, would ensure China’s emissions would not increase past the country’s target cap, regardless of economic growth — though it’s still unclear what that cap would be. The paper reported that the NDRC also predicts China’s greenhouse gas emissions will peak in 2025, rather than 2030, as earlier predictions stated.

If the cap is adopted, it would be a major step for the world’s top CO2 emitter, which desperately needs to slow its carbon production. China is experiencing the world’s fastest growth in energy production and CO2 emissions, while production and emissions in the U.S. and Europe are flat-lining or decreasing. China uses 47 percent of the world’s coal, a number that’s only going up: in 2011, China’s coal consumption grew by 9 percent, accounting for 87 percent of the world’s 374 million ton increase in coal consumption that year.

The country’s emissions aren’t just a major contributor to climate change worldwide — they’re causing serious local problems as well. In Beijing, pollution has reached record levels, topping 775 in January — a number that breaks the Environmental Protection Agency’s air quality scale of 0 to 500. The air pollution levels are so high that Beijing schools are building air-purified domes over playgrounds so that children can play outside, and many expatriates are withdrawing their applications from Beijing jobs or choosing to leave the country altogether.

The possibility of a carbon cap in China has been hailed as “potentially transformative” in the fight against climate change, as other major emitters such as the U.S. have historically cited China’s inaction on climate change as reason to avoid implementing meaningful greenhouse gas regulations. Previously, China has shied away from cuts in emissions, saying its main priority was the growth of its economy. In November 2012, the state-owned Xinhua quoted Xie Zhenhua, China’s chief negotiator to the UN climate change talks, as saying it was “unfair and unreasonable to hold China to absolute cuts in emissions at the present stage, when its per capita GDP stands at just 5,000 U.S. dollars.”
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With weary determination, COP17′s climate negotiators brokered a deal after more than two weeks of grinding political debates. The despair, anger, and resignation felt by almost all parties at the Durban climate summit reflected the knowledge that the power vested in the environment ministers and climate envoys by their respective governments is insufficient to protect human civilization from the exponentially growing onslaught of fossil-fueled climate change. As the New York Times writes — as a simple statement of fact — it is “simply too big a job“:

Effectively addressing climate change will require over the coming decades a fundamental remaking of energy production, transportation and agriculture around the world — the sinews of modern life. It is simply too big a job for those who have gathered for these talks under the 1992 United Nations treaty that began this grinding process.

It is important to recognize, however, that grappling with the climate crisis isn’t simply too big a challenge for environment ministers. When the heads of state of the entire world gathered in Copenhagen in 2009, they too could not redirect the “sinews of modern life.” Although on paper the governments of the United States and other nations command the corporations that run the economy, the evidence is that the multinational corporations have, if not dominance, an equal footing on the world stage. Yet Exxon Mobil, Cargill, Koch Industries, CNOOC, JP Morgan Chase, and Deutsche Bank don’t have any direct accountability in the United Nations negotiations.

Either the nations of the world need to rein in the corporate powers that extract ungodly profit from the very future well-being of mankind, or there needs to be the formal recognition that the financiers and fossil polluters have a greater voice than the people, and thus should have the political accountability that comes from being a member of the league of nations.

Again, given the authority the delegates in Durban actually wield, the resulting agreement was a significant achievement. Given the reality of climate change, the agreement is grossly insufficient.

If the objectives of the UNFCCC treaty signed by the nations of the world to preserve civilization from the destruction of global warming are to be achieved, every local, national, and international institution must play their part, from the Major Economies Forum to the International Monetary Fund, from Davos to OPEC. That may seem to be beyond the realm of political possibility, but as Nelson Mandela said, “It always seems impossible, until it’s done.”

As CAP’s Andrew Light and Joe Romm discuss, the deal crafted in Durban, South Africa preserved the international climate negotiating process and moved several critical institutions forward, most notably the Green Climate Fund to finance the self-preservation of the most vulnerable nations against climate disasters.

However, for the first time the negotiators explicitly and formally recognized the cold fact of the insufficiency of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) agreements, coming into their 20th year:

Recognizing that climate change represents an urgent and potentially irreversible threat to human societies and the planet and thus requires to be urgently addressed by all Parties, and acknowledging that the global nature of climate change calls for the widest possible cooperation by all countries and their participation in an effective and appropriate international response, with a view to accelerating the reduction of global greenhouse gas emissions,

Noting with grave concern the significant gap between the aggregate effect of Parties’ mitigation pledges in terms of global annual emissions of greenhouse gases by 2020 and aggregate emission pathways consistent with having a likely chance of holding the increase in global average temperature below 2 °C or 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels.

This formal admission that the combined effect of Kyoto Protocol and the Cancun Agreements leaves a “significant gap” from the “urgent and potentially irreversible threat” of further warming is a critical admission. This marks a dramatic shift from earlier statements made by the United States team, who questioned the urgency of greater cuts to carbon pollution than already agreed in Kyoto and Cancun.

The 1997 Kyoto Protocol set mandatory limits on carbon pollution covering the industrialized world other than the United States, and the Cancun Accords adopted in 2010 sets voluntary limits covering the United States, China, and other major polluters. Together, their insufficient ambition leaves the world hurtling on a path towards unimaginable suffering, a terrible statement about the futility of negotiating with the laws of nature, and the stark contrast between political and physical reality.

The formal admission of this insufficiency is a small but crucial step towards the required global mobilization to survive on our changing planet.