Chinese envoy urges US help on climate change

Yahoo News 5 Feb 09;

WASHINGTON (AFP) – The United States has a profitable self-interest in assisting Chinese efforts to combat climate change, China's ambassador here said Thursday as global talks loom.

Zhou Wenzhong said China must focus on industrial growth to lift millions of its citizens out of poverty but was not stinting in the global warming fight, outlining a national government plan on efficiency and renewable energy.

But he said China and the United States, the world's two biggest polluters, could profitably work together and set a lead for the international community leading up to December's climate meeting in the Danish capital Copenhagen.

"China and the United States have many shared interests and extensive areas for cooperation on energy and climate change," he said at a Brookings Institution forum.

The United States should offer its "advanced technologies and a rich experience in energy efficiency and clean energy" to boost China's own plan, the ambassador said.

"Cooperation between our two countries on energy and environmental issues will enable China to respond to energy and climate change issues more effectively while at the same time offering enormous business opportunities and considerable return to American investors."

President Barack Obama has pledged to reverse the resistance of his predecessor George W. Bush to action on climate change in the run-up to the Copenhagen talks, designed to forge a successor to the Kyoto climate treaty.

Democrats who control the US Senate and House of Representatives have said they hope to have major legislation creating a "cap-and-trade" system for limiting "greenhouse gases" before the Copenhagen talks.

And they have said the paralyzing US recession is no excuse for inaction -- noting that the massive economic stimulus package Obama has proposed is full of steps to promote clean and renewable energy.

But Republicans have signaled they will not sign on to any system that imposes restrictions on the US economy while letting developing competitors such as China and India off the hook.

China presses for US help on climate change
Jitendra Joshi Yahoo News 6 Feb 09;

WASHINGTON (AFP) – China wants US help rather than complaints on climate change, and could be finding a receptive audience as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton readies to visit Beijing.

With international talks on global warming intensifying this year, China's ambassador here Thursday appealed to US commercial self-interest to assist his government's efforts to combat the problem.

Zhou Wenzhong said China must focus on industrial growth to lift millions of its citizens out of poverty but was not stinting in the global warming fight, outlining a national government plan on efficiency and renewable energy.

And he said China and the United States, the world's two biggest polluters, could profitably work together and set an example for the international community leading up to a December climate meeting in the Danish capital Copenhagen.

"China and the United States have many shared interests and extensive areas for cooperation on energy and climate change," he said at a Brookings Institution forum.

The United States should offer its "advanced technologies and a rich experience in energy efficiency and clean energy" to boost China's own plan, the ambassador said.

"Cooperation between our two countries on energy and environmental issues will enable China to respond to energy and climate change issues more effectively while at the same time offering enormous business opportunities and considerable return to American investors."

President Barack Obama has pledged to reverse the resistance of his predecessor George W. Bush to action on climate change in the run-up to the Copenhagen talks, designed to forge a successor to the Kyoto climate treaty.

Democrats who control the US Senate and House of Representatives have said they hope to have major legislation creating a "cap-and-trade" system for limiting "greenhouse gases" before the Copenhagen talks.

And they have said the paralyzing US recession is no excuse for inaction -- noting that Obama's massive economic stimulus package contains ambitious steps to promote clean and renewable energy.

But Republicans have signaled they will not sign on to any system that imposes restrictions on the US economy while letting developing competitors such as China and India off the hook.

US officials will present their case in person when Clinton visits China on February 20-22 as part of her first overseas trip as secretary of state.

Clinton's new special envoy for climate change, Todd Stern, is to join her in Beijing, a State Department official told AFP, underlining the Obama administration's post-Bush determination to tackle the issue cooperatively.

"We need to put finger-pointing aside and focus on how our two leading nations can work together productively to solve the problem," Stern told the New York Times.

Brookings experts Kenneth Lieberthal and David Sandalow presented a new report proposing incremental steps by the United States and China to cooperate between themselves and so give a push to the Copenhagen process.

Among their recommendations was a climate change summit by Obama and Chinese President Hu Jintao, joint work on clean energy, and the promotion of burgeoning anti-warming initiatives by local governments in both nations.

"It's clear that if the US expects cooperation from China, the US will have to lead," Stuart Eizenstat, the lead US negotiator at the Kyoto talks in the 1990s, told the think tank's forum.

But he also stressed that without well-publicized initiatives on the Chinese side, including a less hardline approach to the needs of developing nations, any successor treaty to Kyoto would be dead on arrival in the US Senate.

Report: US, China must cooperate on climate change
Anita Chang, Associated Press Yahoo News 6 Feb 09;

BEIJING – Cooperation between China and the United States is crucial to successfully addressing the climate change problem, said a report released Friday that was co-produced by the U.S. energy secretary prior to his nomination.

The world's two leading emitters of greenhouse gases have long been at odds over how to handle climate change. China has insisted that developed nations bear the main responsibility for cutting emissions. But the U.S. under former President George W. Bush refused to sign an international pact requiring cuts in emissions, saying developing nations should not be exempt.

"If these two countries cannot find ways to bridge the long-standing divide on this issue, there will literally be no solution," said the report, jointly issued by the Asia Society's Center of U.S.-China Relations and the Pew Center on Global Climate Change.

It called on leaders of the countries to take immediate action and collaborate on developing technologies for clean use of coal, enhancing the use of renewable energy sources such as solar and wind, and creating new mechanisms for financing clean energy.

"We are in uncharted water that will beg an unprecedented effort from both the world at large and the United States and China in particular," the report said.

Environmentalists have welcomed steps on the part of President Barack Obama to address climate change, including the nomination of Steven Chu to the post of energy secretary. Co-chair of the project that produced Friday's report until Obama's December nomination announcement, Chu has vowed to develop clean energy sources and said scientific research is key to tackling climate change.

The global economic crisis has been an opportunity for both the U.S. and China to spur improvements in energy efficiency. A proposed U.S. stimulus package includes grants, tax breaks and loan guarantees to promote solar and wind energy development and to cut energy use in everything from government buildings to schools and homes.

China says it will subsidize investment in energy efficiency and technology as part of a 4 trillion yuan ($586 billion) stimulus package.

"China's economic development is now at a stage where the development must be sustainable and there must be protection of resources and the environment. Therefore, the issue of climate change cannot be avoided," said Liu Deshun, a professor with the Institute of Nuclear Energy and New Energy Technology at Tsinghua University in Beijing.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton plans to address climate change on a visit to China later this month.

And China, whose leadership the report praised as "increasingly well-informed," has been winning kudos for its changing role in recent climate talks. Beijing has agreed that developing countries could help contain carbon emissions — as long as the wealthy industrial countries gave them the needed technology and finances.

In comments to the Financial Times earlier this month, Premier Wen Jiabao said China supports the Copenhagen climate conference scheduled for late 2009, which aims to ink a global agreement on reducing emissions. But he also said it was "difficult" for China to agree to any set emission reduction target.

"This country is still at an early stage of development. Europe started its industrialization several hundred years ago, but for China, it has only been dozens of years," he told the paper.

China, which is heavily dependent on coal to fuel its growing economy, rivals the United States as the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases. But it has said its economy should not be penalized by binding cuts in emissions of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases when their per capita emissions are much below those in developed countries.