Energy Working Group: China's Shifting Priorities and 12th Five-Year Plan
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The world watches closely as China, the world's top energy consumer, announces its plans for the next five years: a series of comprehensive economic reform, development, and transformation guidelines that will shape how the country - and to a large extent the world - uses energy and addresses climate change.
How will China balance economic growth with environmental concerns? How will it manage its transformation from an investment-based and export-led economy to one having a robust domestic demand, all the while ensuring energy efficiency and sustainability? And what role will China play in developing renewable and clean tech solutions for the rest of the world? These are questions that have a profound impact on the world energy and climate landscape for years to come.
In this EWG discussion, we will highlight some of the proposed energy, efficiency and climate goals and policies, look back on China's progress and challenges in achieving its last five-year plan, and consider broader implications on the road ahead.
Stanford University
Joe Chang
Speaker
Seminars
Remaking the World's Largest Coal Market: The Quest to Develop Large Coal-Power Bases in China
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China's coal market is now in the midst of a radical restructuring that has the potential to change how coal is produced, traded and consumed both in China and the rest of the world. The restructuring aims to integrate the coal and power sectors at giant "coal-power bases" that combined would churn out more coal annually than all the coal produced in the entire United States.
Coal-power integration is now a focal point of the Chinese government's energy policy, driven by the dramatic "coal-power conflict". Coal prices are market-based, but power prices are tightly controlled by the government. This has caused massive losses for Chinese power generators in 2008 and 2010 and triggered government intervention in the coal market with attempts to cap the price of coal. The pervasive conflict between coal and power is now driving the Chinese government to remake these markets.
Coal-power base policy aims to establish upwards of 14 major coal-power bases, each producing over 100 mt of coal with consuming industries on-site. The plan envisions that roughly half of China's coal production would be produced at a handful major coal-power base sites that are controlled by key state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and the central government.
PESD's new research analyzes China's coal-power base reforms and how they will impact Chinese and global coal markets. Several key findings are:
First, the implementation of coal-power bases would enhance central government's control over the coal sector and over coal prices. The government could control coal pricing in a large share of the market and mitigate power sector losses by mandating lower coal transaction prices within integrated SOEs. Using this kind of internal transfer pricing at below market prices for up to half of China's coal would represent a meaningful shift in how coal is priced in China. If a large share of China's coal were transacted in this manner, it might create an unofficial two-tiered pricing structure in the coal market.
Second, coal-power base policy would bring about modernization and mechanization of a larger share of China's coal production, in theory bringing larger economies of scale to the sector. While up-front capital investment per ton produced will certainly increase, the marginal cost of coal production should decrease, all other things equal.
Third, the massive rebalancing of China's coal market implied by coal-power bases is poised to have important impacts on the globally traded coal market. Since 2009, China's import behavior has become a dominant factor determining the price of globally traded coal. In simple terms, when Chinese domestic prices are higher than global prices, the country imports. The development of coal-power bases could radically alter coal price formation in China and directly impact China's appetite for imports, and therefore has the potential to alter coal price formation globally.
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Program on Energy and Sustainable Development
Sanela Diana Jenkins HR Series : Reparations, Restitution, and Transitional Justice
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Larry May is a political philosopher who has written on conceptual issues in collective and shared responsibility, as well as normative issues in international criminal law. He has also written on professional ethics and on the Just War tradition.
In addition to being W. Alton Jones Professor of Philosophy and Professor of Law at Vanderbilt University, he is also a Professorial Fellow at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics, Charles Sturt University in Canberra. He has previously taught at Washington University, Purdue University, University of Wisconsin, and University of Connecticut.
He has published 25 books and 100 articles. His five most recent authored books have been published by Cambridge University Press, including: "Genocide: A Normative Account" (2010) and "Global Justice and Due Process" (2011).
His authored books have won awards from the American Philosophical Association, the North American Society for Social Philosophy, the International Association of Penal Law, the American Society of International Law, and the American Library Association. His writings have been translated into French, German, Spanish, Italian, Polish, Serbian, Japanese, Chinese, and Korean.
Professor May has lectured extensively around the world, including, in the last two years, keynote or plenary addresses at conferences in: Oxford, St. Andrews, Oslo, Helsinki, Krakow, Belgrade, Bielefeld, The Hague, Delft, Leiden, Montreal, Victoria, Toronto, Canberra, Melbourne, and Sydney.
He has served on the board of directors of the American Philosophical Association and is past president of AMINTAPHIL, the American section of the International Society for Philosophy of Law. In addition, he has occasionally taken a criminal appeals case, and has worked on several death penalty cases, in the United States.
Landau Economics Building,
ECON 140
Larry May
W. Alton Jones Professor of Philosophy and Professor of Law at Vanderbilt University
Speaker
Seminars
Sanela Diana Jenkins HR Series : Never Again : Perspectives on Preventing Mass Killings
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David Pressman is an American human rights lawyer and former aide to United States Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright. Pressman served as an advisor to Secretary Janet Napolitano and Chief of Staff to the Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security. Recently he was appointed by President Obama to serve as the Director for War Crimes and Atrocities on the National Security Council at the White House, where he coordinates the Government's efforts to prevent and respond to mass atrocities, genocide, and war crimes.
Pressman also advises a number of highly-visible individuals on foreign policy and related advocacy strategies. A 2008 Los Angeles Times article referred to him as George Clooney's "consigliere." With George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, Don Cheadle, and Jerry Weintraub, Pressman co-founded Not On Our Watch, a leading advocacy and grantmaking organization focused on raising awareness about mass-atrocities.
Landau Economics Building
ECON 140
David Pressman
Director for War Crimes and Atrocities on the National Security Council, White House
Speaker
Seminars
Sanela Diana Jenkins HR Series : The Right to Culture as a Human Right : Law in a Multicultural World
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Alison Dundes Renteln is a Professor of Political Science and Anthropology at the University of Southern California where she teaches Law and Public Policy with an emphasis on international law and human rights. A graduate of Harvard (History and Literature), she has a Ph.D. in Jurisprudence and Social Policy from the University of California, Berkeley and a J.D. from the USC Law School. She served as Director of the Jesse Unruh Institute of Politics and as Vice-Chair of the Department of Political Science. In 2005 she received the USC Associates Award for Excellence in Teaching (campus-wide). Her publications include The Cultural Defense (Oxford), which received the 2006 USC Phi Kappa Phi Award for Creativity in Research. Her book co-edited with Marie-Claire Foblets, Multicultural Jurisprudence: Comparative Perspectives on the Cultural Defense was published in 2009 (Hart) and featured in the California Bar Journal (February issue). Another collection, Cultural Diversity and Law: State Responses from Around the World, co-edited with Marie-Claire Foblets and Jean-Francois Gaudreault-Desbiens, was published in 2010 (Bruylant). Cultural Law: International, National, and Indigenous, co-authored with James Nafziger and Robert Paterson, was also published 2010 (Cambridge). Two of her essays appeared in a special issue of Judicature on cross-cultural jurisprudence (March-April 2009) and another on this topic in The Judges' Journal of the American Bar Association (Spring, 2010). Her current project is a study of the jurisprudence of names.
Professor Renteln has collaborated with the United Nations on the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. She lectured on comparative legal ethics in Bangkok and Manila at ABA-sponsored conferences. She has often taught seminars on the rights of ethnic minorities for judges, lawyers, court interpreters, jury consultants, and police officers. During the past few years she participated on panels on cross-cultural justice at the meetings of the American Bar Association, the National Association of Women Judges, the North American South Asian Bar Association, the American Society of Trial Consultants, and others. She served on several California civil rights commissions and the California committee of Human Rights Watch. She is a member of the American Political Science Association, the American Society of International Law, the Law and Society Association, and the Commission on Legal Pluralism.
Landau Economics Building,
ECON 140
Alison Renteln
Professor of Political Science and Anthropology at the University of Southern California
Speaker
Seminars