((To me intensity is a fool’s errand way of dealing with greenhouse gas emissions.))

Seems highly improbable that China’s senior leadership would be unaware of this perspective. The best public evidence suggests China intends to supply the largest proportion of its constantly growing electrical demand at the lowest possible costs by burning coal. I’m betting China’s government will merely convert the cynical urban cap and trade program into a new form of national taxation on industrial production, and it will be a form of taxation that will prove almost impossible to evade. Companies can cook their books and structure their operations to conceal and defer profits, as we should suppose all Chinese companies do, but the power meter reports power consumption regardless of company profit or loss. The cap and trade program will however provide some additional incentive for industrial producers to use power more efficiently. Still the Chinese economy will continue to expand and produce CO2 at a much faster rate than any urban carbon cap and trade program could possibly constrain it.

You may be right that the cap-and-trade policies being implemented in China are merely a ruse. But the 2016 announced objective is for a nationwide cap-and-trade program. And the businesses in urban centres that are being given quotas have to buy their power from somewhere. I assume it is ex-urban coal-fired power plants like those that ring cities like Beijing. That means the carbon has to be counted in some way under traditional cap-and-trade quotas.

My objection is to the way CO2 will be measured based on intensity rather than total volume. To me intensity is a fool’s errand way of dealing with greenhouse gas emissions.