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The answer is that many things were lost. China’s move to terminate all official bi-national cooperation with the U.S. to mitigate the effects of climate change was not only short-sighted. It was, for China, a classic case of cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face. The action was purely political — to protest a visit to Taiwan by Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi, a visit that had ampled precedent going back to 1977 when Speaker Newt Gingrich visited Taiwan. The consequences of China’s unprecedented and over-reactive action — eliminating countless programs to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, promote improve water quality, conserve natural habitats and bio-diversity — will have as much of a detrimental effect, if not more, on developing China as it will on the United States’ developed economy.
Here’s a case study of one opportunity — built for scale and speed — that has been lost …
(click for original, free to read version of this article from Environmental Progress & Sustainable Energy)
On January 13th of this year, President Trump abruptly ordered the termination of the U.S.-China EcoPartnership Program. Seven days before leaving office and without notice, Trump turned the lights off on this 10-year old program, pulling the rug out from under 36 committed and on-going bi-national projects to lower carbon-emissions at global scale.
The Biden Administration is assessing its options for re-vitalizing, in some shape or form, this model of innovative and impactful public-private collaboration to put a dent in global greenhouse gas emissions. This might involve replication of the program to India. ReGen250 is already in the starting gate with a U.S. Mid-Atlantic/State of Maharashtra candidate program should that take shape, as is described on pages 8-9 of our article published last month in the peer-reviewed science journal Environmental Progress and Sustainable Energy.
In the meanwhile, we are pressing forward with unofficial support from the two U.S. Government agencies which ran the EcoPartnership program for ten years — the U.S. Department of State and the U.S. Department of Energy — on a purely private and sub-national basis. Our goal in China looking forward is to explore the possibility of expanding from a regional effort (low-carbon collaboration between the U.S.-Mid-Atlantic and the Jing-Jin-Ji (京津冀) region of Beijing, Tianjin and Hebei Province to national scale.
How will we accomplish this without the direct support of the U.S. Government? The first step was to confirm the Biden Administration’s encouragement of trade with China in support of Paris Accord goals and then to renew our region-to-region BE Better program partnership with our primary partner in China, the TEDA EcoCenter. These steps were taken last quarter.
The next steps involve exploring prospects for the resumption of the Sino-U.S. Eco Park national-level opportunity with the Green Development League as outlined at the 2020 U.S.-China EcoPartnership Summit. (As described in detail in a prior post, the Green Development League comprises the 36 top-ranked NETDZs throughout China and the GDL Secretary-General is our original EcoPartnership partner (the TEDA EcoCenter and its Director Madame Yuyan Song).
As the exclusive U.S.-based working group member for the proposed Sino-U.S. Eco Park, China Partnership would leverage expertise and input from (1) our region-to-region BE Better program partners (experts in “energy-efficient, smart and healthy built environments” for industrial park users) as well as (2) our U.S.-China BEST Cities partners (with additional constituencies of support to include the U.S.-China Business Council, the U.S. Industry Advisory Board of the U.S.-China Clean Energy Research Center for Building Energy Efficiency (CERC-BEE), the National Governors Association, and the National League of Cities) in order to identify a comprehensive range of U.S. clean energy technologies and infrastructures from across eastern, central and western regions of the United States to be incorporated into the Sino-U.S. BE Better Eco Park model.
The primary impact of this milestone — CPGP’s formally joining the Green Development League’s working group for design of a Sino-U.S. Eco Park with scalability and replicability to multiple locations throughout China — is literally “to put the U.S. on the map” alongside eight other similar International Eco Parks already functioning in China under PRC Ministry of Commerce auspices. These eight other Eco Park projects represent mostly Sino-European collaborations (e.g., Sino-German Eco Park, Sino-Swiss Zhenjiang Eco Park, Sino-Austrian Eco Park, Sino-Finland Beijing Eco Park) and, to date, none represents a Sino-U.S. collaboration. The CPGP/U.S.-China BEST Cities model was selected, following the March 27, 2018 deadline for application, due to its unique structure of open collaboration designed to introduce U.S. urban clean energy infrastructures and technologies to TEDA and the 35 other top National Economic-technological Development Zones (NETDZ) in the Green Development League.
Using comparables drawn from the realized, real-world experience of the Sino-German Eco Park in Dalian but adjusted to account for the relatively greater GDP of the U.S., a Sino-U.S. BE Better Eco Park leveraging our EcoPartnership’s platform of energy-efficient, smart, healthy built environment and clean manufacturing for industrial park application should reasonably be expected to realize within its initial 5 years:
• As many as 300 signed project agreements (with nearly 60% of those either in production or under construction during that timeframe) representing total investment of 100 billion RMB (approx. USD 15 billion at today’s exchange rate)
• As many as 90 of these projects would be expected to fall in the high-end manufacturing and new energy field with total investment of 67.5 billion RMB (approx. USD 10 billion at today’s exchange rate)
• As many as 80 of these projects would be expected to fall in the advanced services sector with total investment of 35 billion RMB (approx. USD 5 billion at today’s exchange rate)
We are now actively exploring the most practical route for realizing this goal which would involve resumption, post-Trump Administration, of our primary partnership model with (a) TEDA, (b) the 36 GDLs and (c) the 219 NETDZs. Additionally, we have recourse to a secondary partnership model focused on the Jing-Jin-Ji/Xiongan New Area mega-development project.
With respect to the 35-year macroeconomic development effort ushered in by Deng Xiaoping and the Shenzhen and Pudong macro-development projects, Xiongan has both continuities and distinctive differences. One similarity is the size envisioned for the Xiongan New Area -– roughly 50% bigger than Pudong (east of Shanghai) and slightly larger than Shenzhen (to the north of Hong Kong). While Xiongan can be thought of as culminating the coastal progression of these macro-projects–- starting in the south with Shenzhen in the 1980s and moving to the central coast with Pudong in the 1990s -– the final, northern leg of this triad was wobbly at first. President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao initially envisioned the third macro-project leg as being Binhai to the northeast of Tianjin. Post-2012, however, plans for Binhai lost most of their momentum and it was only with President Xi Jinping’s emergence in power that priority was shifted from Binhai to Xiongan. It is more in the discontinuities between Xiongan and the earlier Shenzhen and Pudong macro-projects that Xiongan’s significance can best be understood. The first 30 years of the PRC’s post-Cultural Revolution industrial development was based on a high-carbon model. (This is frequently referred to in China by the phrase 先污染后治理 meaning “pollute first, clean up (or remediate) later”). In contrast, the Xiongan industrial model championed by Xi Jinping focuses on a different set of values for the next 30-year-or-so phase of China’s development in the 21st century: the goals of (1) promoting and putting into practice low-carbon industrialization and sustainability innovations and (2) lessening social inequality and narrowing the gap between rich and poor in shared benefits of industrialization and economic development.
Among the few dozen officially-awarded U.S.-China EcoPartnerships, the PHL-TEDA EcoPartnership is unique in its design as an open platform to facilitate collaboration among businesses, local governments, universities and non-governmental organizations (NGO). On the U.S. side, the platform is anchored by China Partnership of Greater Philadelphia (CPGP, a 501c3 non- profit) and its public sector partner, the Commerce Department of the City of Philadelphia. The first stage of this collaboration has involved bringing sustainable-city-type BE Better technologies (built environment technologies that are more energy-effiient, smarter and healthier) to our EcoPartnership partner in Tianjin (TEDA). Our longer-term objective is to scale these BE Better technologies throughout China through the network of its national-level industrial parks. The initial stage of this scaling effort focuses on China’s northeastern Jing-Jin-Ji region (comprising Beijing, Tianjin and Hebei Province) through collaborations with Green Development League-member National Economic-Technological Development Zones (NETDZ) in Beijing, Tianjin and Langfang. The longer-term goal is to position for second-stage, nation-wide expansion of the BE Better model through the Green Development League’s 36 member- NETDZs nationwide and through the Ministry of Commerce’s national Eco Park program.
On January 13, 2021 — a scant week short of President-elect Biden’s inauguration — President Trump turned off the lights on this decade-old government-to-government program between the U.S. and China to advance climate change mitigation efforts in both countries. Nonetheless, the PHL-TEDA effort was always conceived as a private-sector driven effort and — with continuing legacy support from the U.S. Departments of Energy and State — we are advancing our BE Better program with our TEDA partner in China and exploring possible broadening of the program to the state of Maharashtra in India.
The complete story of where we have been and where we are going is presented in the attached peer-reviewed article published online earlier this month by the Wiley-owned journal Environmental Progress & Sustainable Energy. The print version of the article will be published in the next few weeks.
The full article can be read by clicking here or on the image below:
We encountered headwinds along the way — a fraudulent bid procurement, Trump’s announced intent to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris Accord, the Tariff War — but, by tacking and keeping our eye fixed on our destination, we have gotten to calmer waters and now have a following wind. Stay tuned for the next leg of the journey.
______Assessing China / The TEA Collaborative______ 