Today on The Negotiation, we speak with Barbara Finamore, Senior Strategic Director for Asia at the Natural Resources Defense Council and the author of Will China Save the Planet (2018). She started her career with the NRDC as an environmental litigator, a position she left after getting married to a U.S. diplomat in the 1980s. Her husband took her to China in 1990, when the country was considering its earliest initiatives for sustainable development.

Barbara was there to witness first-hand the country’s signing of the Framework Convention on Climate Change, as well as the drafting of the world’s first sustainable development blueprint for the 21st century, known as Agenda 21. Since the mid-1990s, Barbara has been heading the NRDC’s energy program in China.

Says Barbara: “I got hooked on the challenges that China faced and getting to know the people who were working to address those challenges, many of whom became leaders in China’s energy and climate policy.”

China’s environmental problems took off alongside its rapid economic growth in 2001 when the country joined the WTO. Its performance during that decade would earn China the moniker of being the world’s “economic miracle”.

China’s most valuable commodity during this period? Coal: the world’s dirtiest fossil fuel and the leading source of CO2 emissions in the world, as well as the source of China’s devastating air pollution. Coal was the cause of 2013’s “airpocalypse”, during which time the Chinese citizens were breathing in an equivalent of one-and-a-half cigarettes per hour every day. In 2018, China launched its Air Pollution Prevention and Control Action Plan which intends to cut down coal use.

COVID-19 has had a tremendous impact on China’s energy and environmental sectors. Chinese citizens have become less willing to take public transit due to crowding. There is a greater interest in private vehicles (which will have negative effects on climate change in the long run). The government has increased its focus on electric vehicles as essential to its long-term industrial transformation—a major element in its “new infrastructure” initiative (other elements include 5G and artificial intelligence).

In the short-term, the Chinese government is taking steps to ease its environmental controls on gasoline-powered engines since the automotive industry as a whole is a pillar industry in China, being responsible for some 10% of jobs and nearly 10% of all retail sales.