Financial Times - "US and China Must Fight Emissions Together"
Op-Ed
Financial Times - "US and China Must Fight Emissions Together"
Today, the Financial Times published an op-ed by the Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee John Kerry (D-MA) entitled"US and China Must Fight Emissions Together".
The full text of the op-ed is below:
US and China Must Fight Emissions Together
By John Kerry
When Richard Nixon visited China in 1972, the distance travelled seemed greater than the 7,000 miles from Washington to Beijing. He was bridging the gap between two worlds that had been sealed off from one another for an entire generation.
When China's leaders land in Washington on Monday for the US-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue, they will arrive as well-known colleagues on a well-travelled route. But while the gulf between the two nations may have narrowed, the challenges before us have only grown.
Back then, a handshake between Nixon and Chinese premier Zhou Enlai was enough to change the world. Today, the world's biggest greenhouse gas emitter and history's biggest emitter, China and America, must change the world again - and nothing less than a transformation of the energy economy will suffice.
The question is, can we forge a partnership bold enough to prevent a climate catastrophe? With December's make-or-break climate talks in Copenhagen looming, the US-China negotiations are an important test. Because other countries will take their cues from us, a successful global climate deal will depend on America and China signalling our seriousness now.
The good news is that, two decades after Nasa scientist Jim Hansen first warned Congress of the threat, the House has passed landmark climate legislation. I am working with Senator Barbara Boxer on a Senate version. America is transforming itself from laggard to leader.
It is well known that China refuses to accept binding cuts in greenhouse gas emissions. Less well known is that China is rapidly embracing clean energy solutions - in some cases outpacing the US. On my visit to China in May, I met with leaders who, until recently, had not been willing to entertain this discussion. Now they are unequivocal that China grasps the urgency and is ready to be a "positive, constructive" player in international climate change negotiations.
Yes, we want more than promises from China - the world's largest emitter must eventually accept binding reductions. But it would be a mistake to focus single-mindedly on what China has said it will not do. Even as we push China to go further, we must deepen our collaboration on what China can and will do now.
We are already cooperating on clean energy. An energy efficiency programme at two steel plants in Shandong, run in partnership with a US laboratory, grew into a China-wide programme covering a thousand enterprises. Stories such as this convinced the Chinese leadership to embrace a 10-year framework for US-China energy cooperation, and led to the agreement to build joint clean energy research centres, signed this month. Now we need to extend these partnerships to climate change.
This week's talks provide the most significant forum for advancing US-China cooperation on issues ranging from finance to security. Climate belongs at the forefront of the agenda. In additional to formalising our research and development partnership, we should use this dialogue to collaborate on high-profile clean energy demonstration projects that show the world that the technology of the future is already here. We can jointly commercialise new technologies such as carbon capture and storage and concentrated solar power.
We must also train specialised workers. Transforming our energy use cannot happen in Washington and Beijing alone - it must be carried out by engineers and technicians in cities and villages across both nations.
Our relationship with China must be a blueprint for future collaboration. We need to engage in the same dialogue with countries such as India to convince them that all of us are worse off when nations shift the blame instead of sharing the burden.
A century before Nixon's visit, the Chinese leapfrogged technologies and bypassed the telegram - which was impractical for the Chinese system of writing - to embrace a new US invention: the telephone. Today we need China to forgo the carbon-intensive industrial processes that fuelled the west in the 19th and 20th centuries and to pioneer the clean technologies of the 21st. Sceptics are right that if China does not reciprocate, our domestic efforts will be for naught. But surely, with our climate at stake, America and China's differences demand broader and deeper climate co-operation, not less.
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