A high-powered group of senior Republicans and Democrats led two missions to China in the final months of the administration of US president George W. Bush for secret back-channel negotiations aimed at securing a deal on joint US-Chinese action on climate change, the Guardian has learned.
The initiative, involving John Holdren, now the White House science adviser, and others who went on to positions in US President Barack Obama’s administration, produced a draft agreement in March, barely two months after Obama assumed the presidency.
The memorandum of understanding was not signed, but those involved in opening up the channel of communications believe it could provide the foundation for a US-Chinese accord to battle climate change as early as this autumn.
“My sense is we are now working towards something in the fall,” said Bill Chandler, director of the energy and climate program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and a driving force behind the talks. “It will be serious. It will be substantive and it will happen.”
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, US 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 dialogue also challenges the conventional wisdom that Bush’s decision to pull the US out of the Kyoto treaty led to paralysis in the administration on global warming, and that China was unwilling to contemplate emissions cuts at a time of rapid economic growth.
“There are these two countries that the world blames for doing nothing, and they have a better story to tell,” said Terry Tamminen, who took part in the talks and is an environmental adviser to California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.
The first communications, in the fall of 2007, were initiated by the Chinese. Xie Zhenhua (謝振華), vice chairman of the National Development and Reform Commission, made the first move by expressing an interest in a cooperative effort on carbon capture and storage and other technologies with the US.
The first face-to-face meeting got off to a tentative start, with Xie falling back on China’s stated policy positions.
“It was sort of like pushing a tape recorder,” Chandler said, “[but after a short while] he just cut it off and said we need to get beyond this.”
The two sides began discussing ways to break the impasse, including the possibility that China would agree to voluntary — but verifiable — reductions of greenhouse gas emissions. China has rejected the possibility of cuts as it sees them as a risk to its continued economic growth, deemed essential to lift millions out of poverty and advance national status.
Taiya Smith, an adviser on China to former US Treasury secretary Henry Paulson, 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.”
“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,” Smith said.
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Young women standing idly around a park in Tokyo’s west suggest that a giant statue of Godzilla is not the only attraction for a record number of foreign tourists. Their faces lit by the cold glow of their phones, the women lining Okubo Park are evidence that sex tourism has developed as a dark flipside to the bustling Kabukicho nightlife district. Increasing numbers of foreign men are flocking to the area after seeing videos on social media. One of the women said that the area near Kabukicho, where Godzilla rumbles and belches smoke atop a cinema, has become a “real
‘WATER WARFARE’: A Pakistani official called India’s suspension of a 65-year-old treaty on the sharing of waters from the Indus River ‘a cowardly, illegal move’ Pakistan yesterday canceled visas for Indian nationals, closed its airspace for all Indian-owned or operated airlines, and suspended all trade with India, including to and from any third country. The retaliatory measures follow India’s decision to suspend visas for Pakistani nationals in the aftermath of a deadly attack by shooters in Kashmir that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The rare attack on civilians shocked and outraged India and prompted calls for action against their country’s archenemy, Pakistan. New Delhi did not publicly produce evidence connecting the attack to its neighbor, but said it had “cross-border” links to Pakistan. Pakistan denied any connection to