The summit of Copenhagen has inspired some hot debate on the media, for the most part more related to international politics than to climate change. Some spectacular pieces like Mark Lynas’ on the Guardian have been followed by more moderate opinions, like those appeared on Danwei and Inside Out, trying to understand the roles of China and US in this affair.

But of all I have read on the subject, the best information around is still to be found on the Shanghai Scrap blog. He reminds us that climate change is not and cannot be the first priority for the government and the people of China today. It is an "uptown" concern, completely foreign to those who are still worrying whether their drinking water contains lead, or whether they will need a gas mask to breathe the Beijing air tomorrow.

But back to the question: Did China really wreck the Copenhagen deal? In other words, was there really a deal ready to be signed and China unexpectedly rejected it, ruining the heroic efforts of the Western World led by president Obama?

What the hell happened in Copenhagen

Have you noticed that, when there is something really important in stake, governments organize summits as small as possible to get a meaningful deal, and only reluctantly they accept new participants in the G groups? The climate summits are just the opposite, everyone is invited, carbon footprint and all, the more the merrier. The World has become so multilateral today… especially when multilateralism is in our own interest.

Climate change is always a great subject for politicking, because the success in the negotiations or the problems arising from the failures will not be felt during the political life of the protagonists. It is one of those subjects where the only real measure of success is the perception of the home public immediately after the meeting. And clever politicians don’t let the opportunity pass to fabricate a good story.

For the Obama administration the objective of the negotiations can be summarized as: ensuring a deal is signed sufficiently meaningless to cause little problems with the industrial lobbies, and sufficiently powerful that the climate change enthusiasts are satisfied. Since this is obviously impossible, there is a plan B: ensure that whatever happens, it is somebody else’s fault. This is where China makes an excellent partner.

Partly for the reasons given in the Shanghai Scrap posts, and partly because it is not a democracy and it can control the information circulating internally, China is much less worried about the Copenhagen game than Obama. Free of internal pressure and faced with very mild international pressure, Chinese leaders will logically reject any deal that involves a sacrifice for their country. They will also neglect to give a coherent explanation in the language of the international media, offering a great target for post-Copenhagen accusations.

Now, I know Obama’s ambassador is not not an expert in China, but I can’t believe he was so incompetent to ignore the facts above. Obama himself was in China a month ago, and it is impossible that he didn’t know the obvious: that China was never going to sign an agreement forcing her to accept international inspectors with access to virtually every strategic industry, and with the power to expose to the World and to the Chinese public all the weaknesses of the Chinese system.

I wouldn’t go as far as to say that China and US position was pre-arranged between Obama and Hu, but I think the American delegation, during and after the visit to China have been more intelligent than what most observers imagine.

Ever since the times of Kyoto, the US was at the head of the evil carbon emitters. Obama had to make a difference with his predecessor, and for the moment he has already worked a miracle: without making any major concession, the US have now become the World Champions of climate change policies.

In the meantime, the EU countries, the only ones that take this climate change thing seriously, are again pushed into the background because of their lack of credible leadership… and Obama, the clever American, has made the most of it for himself and for his country.

And in the meantime, the climate is changing…

One of the funniest accusations I have read in the media after the Copenhagen summit is that China has prevented the developed countries from signing a deal to limit their own emissions. This is so stupid that it could make it into a China Daily headline. How can China prevent the US/EU/Japan from signing a deal among themselves to reduce their own emissions?

No, seriously, if we are going to act against climate change, I would propose: what about reaching an agreement among the developed countries first, like we did for so many things before, and put it into practice even without China?

Yes, I know, to make a carbon reduction effective, all countries should participate. But the same could be said of the GATT/WTO and many other deals at the time, and this didn’t stop us from signing it and push China into it much later. Once the developed World is united, it is always much easier to lobby together for the respect of some standards, or to impose sanctions to non compliant countries.

But why do all that, when it is easy to content the public with less?

If you’ve been around in Shanghai today you might have noticed there was a Beijing nip in the air. One could almost smell the 烤鸭 as the temperature got rapidly freezing by midday. In the same time, the air felt clean like it does in the clean Northern winters, and it’s been a great day for a walk if this weather suits your clothes.

This is how it looked down the line of Nanjing Lu seen from the French concession:

A little search on the internet confirms that it is indeed the North Winds that are sweeping the pollution out of Shanghai and bringing us the blue skies. I found this cool weather site that is  more technical than the usual mainstream ones, and more enjoyable with lots of buttons and levers for all the geeks to play with.

This is what I got for Shanghai winds today:

I always love to google up “Shanghai Air Pollution Index”. It doesn’t give you a clue about the real state of pollution, but at least it shows some typical difference in perception.  These are the 3rd and 4th results:

Shanghai’s Air Quality Improves .China Daily

Shanghaiist: Shanghai air quality now sucks even harder .Shanghaiist

Whatever. The intention of this post is to start monitoring the air quality in Shanghai. During these past years leading to the Olympics, foreign residents in Beijing have been insistingly complaining about the pollution and have finally managed to have the government take some serious action.

Having lived in both places, I’ve always held that pollution in Shanghai is as bad as in Beijing. We have the World Exhibition coming, so now’s the time to start building the pressure to get the authorities do something about Shangai too. In case you are thinking that the EXPO 2010 is not as important as the Olymics, you might want to check out this article from the October issue of CER. The EXPO will have more than 10 times the visitors of the Olympic games, that is, 180 million lungs breathing in the Shanghai air in 2010. There’s clearly a critical mass to try some lung lobbying.

I also found that the blog “Mad about Shanghai” started some time ago a particular pollution scale, and for some reason gave up after a year. I will not apply the same scale, but I have a simplified one that I developed the first week i got to Shanghai: the Plaza 66 scale. It is simple, visibility index = the number of floors you can see when you look up at this building on Nanjing XiLu. Today we had a Full 66 (albeit with some browinsh hue in the horizon).

Now, I know if we really want to get technical you might say that visibility doesn’t equal pollution, and that Shanghai being in a more humid area, worse visibility is to be expected. There are also the famous API measurements done by the chinese authorities, and shown in this interesting  website for any day in the last 7 years. It shows that Shanghai has no problem with pollution.

But I have been an engineer for long enough to know that numbers are the most powerful tool of deception. I’m not buying the “blue sky day” statistics of the Shanghai Environment Monitoring Centre (SEMC). I have compared it with My Nose Monitoring Centre (MNMC), which says that, everytime you get back to Shanghai from a trip in the country, you can actually smell the air the minute you step out of the train in any one of those yellow “blue days”

I will be posting once in a while to see if there is any improvement from now to the EXPO. For more information on how China measures the pollution, you can read this very interesting post by an environment engineer explaining all you don’t want to know about API.

If you are not scared of the hard numbers, you can also check out the Shangzilla measuring scale, although judging by the number of reads, you probably have seen it before. As for me, I will stick to my Zhongnanhais while they are in stock. At least the air I breath in goes through a filter first.