Foreign policy ‘trilemmas’: understanding China's stance on international cap-and-trade

This article uses a policy analogy approach to explore China's attitude toward the possibility of global carbon market integration, including the development of a common cap-and-trade market for the global civil aviation industry. Like in other foreign policy domains, in international cap-and-trade, China faces a ‘trilemma’ between carbon market integration, state sovereignty and policy flexibility. By referring to how China has approached a comparable trilemma in foreign exchange policy making, we analyse China's possible stance on international cap-and-trade. We argue that China will prefer to gradually establish and strengthen, to a limited extent, intergovernmental governance mechanisms, which allow nation-states to prioritize sovereignty and policy flexibility in carbon trading policy making. In the conclusion we use this argument to explain China's responses to the carbon-trading initiatives of Australia, the EU, the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), and the World Bank.

Policy relevance

The international community has reached a consensus on the use of market mechanisms for mitigating climate change. While opposing the EU's plan to include Chinese airlines in the EU Emissions Trading Scheme, China has started to co-explore with Australia the possibility of linking their carbon markets, and has adopted a supportive attitude toward the carbon trading initiatives led by the ICAO and the World Bank. Considering China's status as the largest emitting country of GHGs and its interdependence with major developed and developing countries, China's substantial participation would be crucial to the success of the global market-based efforts to reduce GHG emissions. This article presents an initial attempt to develop a better understanding of China's stance on international cap-and-trade.     

Late orogenic, large-scale rotations in the Tien Shan and adjacent mobile belts in Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan

Most of Kazakhstan belongs to the central part of the Eurasian Paleozoic mobile belts for which previously proposed tectonic scenarios have been rather disparate. Of particular interest is the origin of strongly curved Middle and Late Paleozoic volcanic belts of island-arc and Andean-arc affinities that dominate the structure of Kazakhstan. We undertook a paleomagnetic study of Carboniferous to Upper Permian volcanics and sediments from several localities in the Ili River basin between the Tien Shan and the Junggar–Alatau ranges in southeast Kazakhstan. Our main goal was to investigate the Permian kinematic evolution of these belts, particularly in terms of rotations about vertical axes, in the hope of deciphering the dynamics that played a role during the latest Paleozoic deformation in this area. This deformation, in turn, can then be related to the amalgamation of this area with Baltica, Siberia, and Tarim in the expanding Eurasian supercontinent. Thermal demagnetization revealed that most Permian rocks retained a pretilting and likely primary component, which is of reversed polarity at three localities and normal at the fourth. In contrast, most Carboniferous rocks are dominated by postfolding reversed overprints of probably “mid-Permian” age, whereas presumably primary components are isolated from a few sites at two localities. Mean inclinations of primary components generally agree with coeval reference values extrapolated from Baltica, whereas declinations from primary as well as secondary components are deflected counterclockwise (ccw) by up to  90°. Such ccw rotated directions have previously also been observed in other Tien Shan sampling areas and in the adjacent Tarim Block to the south. However, two other areas in Kazakhstan show clockwise (cw) rotations of Permian magnetization directions. One area is located in the Kendyktas block about 300 km to the west of the Ili River valley, and the other is found in the Chingiz Range, to the north of Lake Balkhash and about 400 km to the north of the Ili River valley. The timing of the ccw as well as cw rotations is clearly later than the disappearance of any marine basins from northern Tarim, the Tien Shan and eastern Kazakhstan, so that the rotations cannot be attributed to island-arc or Andean-margin plate settings — instead we attribute the rotations to large-scale, east–west (present-day coordinates), sinistral wrenching in an intracontinental setting, related to convergence between Siberia and Baltica, as recently proposed by Natal'in and Şengör [Natal'in, B.A., and Şengör, A.M.C., 2005. Late Palaeozoic to Triassic evolution of the Turan and Scythian platforms: the pre-history of the palaeo-Tethyan closure, Tectonophysics, 404, 175–202.]. Our previous work in the Chingiz and North Tien Shan areas on Ordovician and Silurian rocks suggested relative rotations of  180°, whereas the Permian declination differences are of the order of 90° between the two areas. Thus, we assume that about 50% of the total post-Ordovician rotations are of pre-Late Permian age, with the other half of Late Permian–earliest Mesozoic age. The pre-Late Permian rotations are likely related to oroclinal bending during plate boundary evolution in a supra-subduction setting, given the calc-alkaline character of nearly all of the pre-Late Permian volcanics in the strongly curved belts.     

Climate Variability, Climate Change and Water Resource Management in the Great Lakes

Water managers always have had to cope with climate variability. All water management practices are, to some extent, a response to natural hydrologic variability. Climate change poses a different kind of problem. Adaptation to climate change in water resource management will involve using the kinds of practices and activities currently being used. However, it remains unclear whether or not practices and activities designed with historical climate variability will be able to cope with future variability caused by atmospheric warming. This paper examines the question of adaptation to climate change in the context of Canadian water resources management, emphasizing issues in the context of the Great Lakes, an important binational water resource.     

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1674987111001113

The Rheic Ocean was one of the most important oceans of the Paleozoic Era.It lay between Laurentia and Gondwana from the Early Ordovician and closed to produce the vast Ouachita-Alleghanian -Variscan orogen during the assembly of Pangea.Rifting began in the Cambrian as a continuation of Neoproterozoic orogenic activity and the ocean opened in the Early Ordovician with the separation of several Neoproterozoic arc terranes from the continental margin of northern Gondwana along the line of a former suture.The rapid rate of ocean opening suggests it was driven by slab pull in the outboard lapetus Ocean.The ocean reached its greatest width with the closure of lapetus and the accretion of the periGondwanan arc terranes to Laurentia in the Silurian.Ocean closure began in the Devonian and continued through the Mississippian as Gondwana sutured to Laurussia to form Pangea.The ocean consequently plays a dominant role in the Appalachian-Ouachita orogeny of North America,in the basement geology of southern Europe,and in the Paleozoic sedimentary,structural and tectonothermal record from Middle America to the Middle East.Its closure brought the Paleozoic Era to an end.     

A Protocol for the Determination of the Rare Earth Elements at Picomole Level in Rocks by ICP-MS: Results on Geological Reference Materials USGS PCC-1 and DTS-1

Rare earth element analyses are widely used in geology, environmental science and archaeology. Over the past decade inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometry has become an important source of rare earth data on geological material. However, ICP-MS analysis of rock samples without pre-concentration can be problematic because of complex sample matrices that can generate significant molecular isobaric interferences on rare earth peaks and which need to be corrected. Such problems are exacerbated for ultramafic rocks because the low levels of rare earth elements demand more concentrated solutions in order to maintain signals above background levels. These high solid loads result in intra-run changes in instrument sensitivity which need to be monitored. Pre-concentration chemistries have been developed in order to avoid high solid loads but these are time-consuming and must offer quantitative recoveries or use a yield tracer. Here, we describe an alternative method for rare earth element analysis by ICP-MS, which involves no pre-concentration and is, therefore, able to deliver data rapidly. Our approach is to apply an external correction procedure, based on the analysis of a reference material closely matched in composition to the unknown samples, which allows correction for both interferences and variations in instrument sensitivity. Testing this method, we obtained accurate rare earth element results for basaltic rocks with a precision of about 2% (1s). We demonstrate that the method is also applicable to ultramafic rocks with abundances at ultra-trace (ng g⁻¹) level and present data for twelve separate dissolutions of the peridotite USGS PCC-1 and four separate dissolutions of the dunite DTS-1 reference materials. The repeatability of the data is between 3% and 9% (1s).