Slow Sino-U.S. Synergy on Climate Change
US-China cooperation on climate change urged,Slow Sino-U.S. Synergy on Climate Change In the run-up to Copenhagen, the United States and China have set the right tone for cooperation. Will concrete action follow? (Caijing Magazine) An American writer once quipped that everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it. That's not the case with Chinese and U.S. leaders. They've talked a lot about the weather this year, and in many ways they're starting to do something about it together – at least in the area of controlling the effects of human activity on climate change. Cooperating on climate change was the focus of a telephone conversation October 21 between Chinese President Hu Jintao and U.S. President Barack Obama. The two men are set to continue their discussion during Obama's first official visit to Beijing in mid-November. Most observers agree that these countries, the world's largest greenhouse gas emitters and notable non-signatories of the Kyoto Protocol on combating global warming, have a lot to sort out before joining other participating nations in December at the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference in Denmark, where international leaders hope to thrash out details for a new global climate change compact. Kyoto is set to expire in 2012. The process was launched in 1997 to establish legally binding obligations for developed countries to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. As of October, the protocol had been ratified by 184 governments. And as the Copenhagen meeting approaches, Washington and Beijing have been stepping up their cooperation efforts by confronting climate change challenges unilaterally and bilaterally. Coordinated Efforts On the home front, Obama offered a down payment for accelerated development of the U.S. clean energy sector when he signed the Recovery and Reinvestment Act in February. Three months later, China released its basic position for the Copenhagen conference. Further progress came in July, when Congress passed the Clean Energy and Security Act, setting the stage for cutting domestic emissions 17 percent by 2020 and 80 percent by 2050 from 2005 levels, and giving future U.S. administrations the authority to levy "carbon tariffs" on countries that do not set fixed quotas on greenhouse gas emissions. That same month, during a visit to China by U.S. Secretary of Energy Steven Chu and Secretary of Commerce Gary Locke, the two countries signed a memorandum of understanding with China for tightening building codes and retrofitting existing buildings to cut energy waste. They also agreed to set up a joint research center on clean energy. Then at a U.S.-China Security and Economic Dialogue in Washington, the two countries signed another memorandum to strengthen climate change, energy and environmental cooperation.
In September, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao told the Davos World Economic Forum that the country's energy consumption per GDP, sulfur dioxide emissions and chemical oxygen demand have fallen by 10 percent, 9 percent and 6.6 percent, respectively. Later, Hu promised at a UN Climate Summit that China would significantly lower per-GDP carbon dioxide emissions by 2020 compared with the level in 2005. And in September, the United States and China launched eight initiatives on clean energy cooperation, including an initiative to create strategic energy zones in each country aimed at removing policy and technological barriers to progress. Common Ground Although China and the United States have many shared interests and good reasons for cooperating in the climate change arena, they may lack confidence in their ability to find direction for fleshing them out. This shortcoming appears to have been behind the blank-face reactions among participants at a recent U.S.-China Clean Energy Forum in Beijing. The stares were in response to comments by Stapleton Roy, a former U.S. ambassador to China, when he asked for something more concrete from the two countries. It seems what frustrated some forum participants was not a lack of mutual trust for confronting climate change, but that they found the interaction of economic development, energy security and environmental protection unsettlingly complex. Many in the United States argue that, without participation by major emerging economies, any protocol on climate change and emissions reductions would fail. But what China argues is that economic and environmental development should be balanced. As a result, Chinese leaders say they can't accept a legally binding, quantifiable target for cutting emissions at the current stage of negotiations. Instead, the Chinese government says climate change is a developmental issue. "The environment issue can't be separated from energy and the economy," said Wang Jisi, dean of Peking University's International Relations School, whose view reflects the Chinese gov |
Slow Sino-U.S. Synergy on Climate Change