New Climate Between China and the U.S.

There are openings in the talks between the two pollution superpowers. New negotiations are in sight.

Last July, a little while after being assured the nomination of his party for the presidential election, Barack Obama sent some of his representatives to Beijing for high-level, two day talks on climate change.

At the meeting, which took place in a luxurious hotel that faces the Great Wall, to the north of Beijing, the Chinese delegation participated and was led by Xie Zhenhua, the most important Chinese negotiator on climate issues. Among the Americans, John Holdren was present, a man who is now at the head of President Obama’s scientific advisors.

The negotiations went so well that in October there was a second meeting where an informal agreement on three points was reached. The key point, according to what William Chandler of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace said, who contributed to organizing these informal negotiations, is that China and the United States would work together for a good result on climate negotiations in Copenhagen in December 2009.

If this effort is translated into concrete policies, it will become the biggest step forward in the history of diplomacy for climate change. Together, these two countries produce 40 precent of annual global emissions of greenhouse gases and, therefore, if the rest of the world wants to find a solution to global warming, it can’t do it without them. If the two superpowers announce credible and ambitious plans to limit their own emissions, this would encourage other countries to do the same and would give a very strong incentive for a solid agreement to be reached in Copenhagen.

The turn in these informal negotiations came on the first day, says Chandler. For more than 10 years, Washington refused to reduce emissions if China didn’t do the same, but Beijing never gave in, reminding us that at the origin of global warming there are 200 years of emissions attributable to the industrialization of developed countries. And, furthermore, the pro capita emissions of China are a fifth of those of the U.S.

The impasse was brought up again at the Great Wall meeting when a member of the United States’ group asked what the Chinese would be willing to do if the next U.S. president worked at reducing emissions. “Xie began to respond,” tells Chandler, “and it was as if he had started a new recorded tape. It was the usual speech: the responsibility of the problem fell on the United States, while China, since it is a developing country, had the right to consume more energy and so forth. After 45 seconds, however, Xie interrupted himself, as if stopping the recording, and said: ‘But now we must go beyond.’ At that point we understood that things had changed.”

One explanation of the new Chinese flexibility is that its leadership has finally understood how strongly climate change could affect China. One government study warns that, from now until 2040, high temperatures and rains of unforeseeable rhythm and intensity could reduce the production of grain by 37 percent, putting at risk the ability of China to nourish its own population and to maintain stability in the country.

However, the obstacles for a U.S.-China agreement remain. Officially, China asks the United States to reduce its own emissions by 40 percent by 2020, a goal that goes much beyond the normative Waxman-Markey package currently in Congress. In the meantime, the United States is insisting that China also accepts goals for reducing emissions, something which Beijing refuses to do.

The unofficial negotiations, however, have indicated a path: China and the United States agree on implementing as quickly as possible the existing technologies to improve energy efficiency; that is to say, the fastest way to reduce emissions.

Chinese energy needs could be reduced by a third by 2050, while the United States, if all the states adopt the same parameters of California, could lower theirs by 30 percent. This is resting on the results of a second informal agreement: the joint development of low impact technologies for motor vehicles and energy plants.

It is important to have goals for limiting emissions, but if Washington and Beijing are not able to come to an agreement on this point, it allows at least one of the two polluting superpowers to give life to a revolution in clean technology and energy efficiency that could achieve the same objectives. Such collaborations are still in discussion, clarified Todd Stern, Obama’s negotiator for climate affairs, at the end of the Beijing negotiations at the beginning of June. If President Obama and Chinese President Hu Jintao are able to soon announce a formal agreement, Copenhagen could prove to be a success after all.