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For once the Greens are right. The G8 summit’s vague commitment to halve emissions of carbon dioxide by 2050 was coupled with something far from vague: ‘passing the buck’ on emissions cuts to China and India.

The G8 urged China and India to engage in ‘meaningful mitigation actions’ – efforts to slow emissions by conserving energy. This was little more than a Western threat to play hardball with China and the rest of the East in the international negotiations on climate change.

The G8 nations know very well that China needs more and more energy. Indeed, they blame Chinese demand for inflating the price of oil… when they are not blaming China for general inflation. But that doesn’t prevent them from insisting that China, responsible for just 9.2 per cent of the world’s stock of CO2 emissions since 1900, do what they say.

Why China matters

Kerry Brown: The importance of China in solving our main global problems

Background

• The poison infecting China

• The farce of bashing China's human rights record

• China is losing the human rights race

• How experts replaced intellectuals

Eco-imperialism is alive and well and living in the West

James Woudhuysen: The West's pleading with China to cut carbon emissions bursts with ulterior motives

Unsurprisingly, China – as well as India, Brazil, Mexico and South Africa – has rejected the G8’s stance. But we can be certain that climate change will remain the cutting edge of the West’s attempts to control the pace of Chinese growth over the next few years.

In his new book Rivals: How the Power Struggle Between China, India and Japan Will Shape Our Next Decade , Bill Emmott has drawn a vivid sketch of how broad economic antagonisms between the West and China – on trade, on China’s state-controlled investment funds – are likely to intertwine with diplomacy on greenhouse gas emissions. Nobody should imagine that an unsullied desire to save the planet is all that informs the G8’s demands on China.

I heard a new phrase at a conference recently: eco-imperialism. The speaker meant China’s rapacious search for oil and other raw materials in Africa. Of course, Britain, France and America, not to speak of the Netherlands and Belgium, never did anything like that.

But the eco-imperialism I am concerned with is the West’s use of Green issues to try to stigmatise and browbeat the Chinese.

Bureaucrats in Beijing can only marvel at their luck. The coming decade will offer them a fair number of domestic challenges to their legitimacy. But the more the West continues its green condescension toward China, the more the Chinese Communist Party will be able to play on national feeling and so win popular support.

These are the bitter fruits of eco-imperialism.

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Join the Debate: Read Yiyi Lu on why China is now paying a heavy environmental price for its economic growth

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James Woudhuysen is Professor of Forecasting and Innovation, De Montfort University, Leicester