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Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission
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| Xie Zhenhua at the UN climate change conference, December 2008 |
A high-powered group of senior Republicans and Democrats led two missions to China in the final months of the Bush administration for secret backchannel negotiations aimed at securing a deal on joint US-Chinese action on climate change.
The initiative, involving John Holdren, now the White House science adviser, and others who went on to positions in Barack Obama’s administration, produced a draft agreement in March, barely two months after the Democrat assumed the presidency…
“My sense is that we are now working towards something in the fall,” said Bill Chandler, director of the energy and climate programme at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and the driving force behind the talks. “It will be serious. It will be substantive, and it will happen.”
John Holdren, head of White House science office
Daylife/Washington Post/Newsweek used by permission
The secret missions suggest that advisers to Obama came to power firmly focused on getting a US-China understanding in the run-up to the crucial UN meeting in Copenhagen this December, which is aimed at sealing a global deal to slash greenhouse gas emissions. In her first policy address the secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, said she wanted to recast the broad US-China relationship around the central issue of climate change. She also stopped in Beijing on her first foreign tour…
The first communications, in the autumn of 2007, were initiated by the Chinese. Xie Zhenhua, the vice-chairman of the National Development and Reform Commission, the country’s central economic planning body, made the first move by expressing interest in a co-operative effort on carbon capture and storage and other technologies with the US…
Taiya Smith, an adviser on China to Bush’s treasury secretary, Hank Paulson, who was at the first of the two sessions, said: “The thing that came out of it that was priceless was the recognition on both sides that what China was doing to [reduce] the effects of climate change were not very well known,” she said. “After these discussions was a real public campaign by the Chinese government to try to make people aware of what they were doing. We started to see the Chinese take a different tone which was that ‘we are active and engaged in trying to solve the problem’.”
RTFA. A good deal we haven’t heard about before. Seems clear the Chinese expected the same election results many activists did. And in 2007 and 2008, it was possible to get a bipartisan working group together from the United States – for bilateral talks.
No surprise that some of the folks taking part in those discussions ended up in Obama’s administration.
JimR said: “It’s a real mess eh?”
Man, that the understatement of the year!!
what a huge waste of time and resources.
personally, this article makes no sense.
i see no reason why china would commit economic suicide by embracing scandalous carbon policies that will all but
eliminate its major competitive advantage.
just as over-bearing enviromental policies have helped to send whole industries
and jobs out of the America, as soon as China kills it’s cost advantage, companies will move to Indonesia, East Asia and the like.
imo, this is just a bunch of political hot air. China is on a jobs/stability kick. the last thing it wants is more unemployment.
China’s growth explosion has enabled many
Chinese to experience a taste of “the good life” -many for the first time in their lives.
the longer these workers remain idle, the possibility of labour unrest increases.
organized labor protests is probably the one thing that strikes fear in the heart of Beijing. especially since China has been trying to move away from it’s standard policy of sending in riot police wherever any uprisings occur.
-and heaven forbid should it’s workers be unemployed long enough to get a wild hair up
their butts and think of forming Labour Unions.
-nope, if anything, i think this is just a puff piece for China to appear in agreement with environmental carbon issues, so as to help support it’s desire to replace the USD
with the Yuan as the new world reserve currency. (or at least, to ensure the Yuan
is included in the “basket of currencies”
to replace the USD.)
as an aside, this would also give obama’s administration big “marketing points” for
it’s next election cycle if they can say they got the mighty Chinese Empire to see the err of it’s ways. (etc etc)
(-personally, i’d much rather they address water pollution. i mean, 1billion+ people must produce a massive amount of waste that gets piped straight into the ocean.. (not to mention the insane amounts of water used by industry to among many other things, process coal.)
-s