Gallagher in Climate Wire on BRI Emissions
Kevin Gallagher, Director of the Global Development Policy (GDP) Center and Professor of Global Development Policy at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies, was quoted in a recent article on how Belt and Road borrower nations can help keep the initiative’s emissions in check.
Gallagher was quoted in an April 26, 2019 in Climate Wire entitled “Borrower Nations Could Keep Belt and Road Emissions in Check.”
From the text of the article:
“If you ask the Chinese for coal, they’re saying, ‘We are ready,’ because they’ve got overcapacity and excess demand and environmental regulations at home,” said Kevin Gallagher, director of Boston University’s Global Development Policy Center.
“If you ask for coal, you’re getting coal, but if you ask for energy, they’ve got it all,” Gallagher said. “They’ve got the whole menu.”
Boston University’s Gallagher noted that environmental damage by some of the initiative’s projects had caused Belt and Road to lose prestige abroad, and led to costly delays and unwillingness by governments to do business with Chinese investors.
“Whether it be hydropower in Myanmar or a coal plant in Bangladesh, there’s lots of social and environmental conflict in and around all the projects,” he said.
China has generally followed the regulations of the countries in which it operates. For Bangladesh, which has few laws on its books requiring community engagement or protection of air or water quality, Chinese-backed projects have generally not bothered with those things. But they’ve been blamed when things went wrong, said Gallagher.
“There are protests, and some of the folks out on the street have Twitter accounts that are linked with transnational [nongovernmental organizations] like NRDC, which have turned it into a global campaign,” he said. “No businessperson wants that. And that’s a mistake.”
Gallagher said China could regain some of the international goodwill it has lost and limit risk to its balance sheet by taking a more proactive stance in aligning its BRI investments with the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals and to the Paris Agreement.
Gallagher serves on the United Nations’ Committee for Development Policy and co-chairs the T-20 Task Force on International Financial Architecture at the G-20. He previously served on the investment sub-committee of the Advisory Committee on International Economic Policy at the US Department of State and on the National Advisory Committee at the Environmental Protection Agency. Gallagher has been a visiting or adjunct professor at the Paul Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University, the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University; El Colegio de Mexico in Mexico; Tsinghua University in China, and the Center for State and Society in Argentina. @KevinPGallagher