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Climate change: Clinton in China
Viewpoint
Thursday February 12th 2009
In choosing Beijing for her first overseas visit Clinton is showing her green priorities. Suzanne Goldenberg reports
Thursday February 12th 2009
Clinton has been invited to the Philippines by the country's president, Gloria Arroyo. Photograph: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters
As the old saying goes: location, location, location. Hillary Clinton was this week finalising plans for her first overseas visit as US secretary of state. Her destination? China. After sending her top crisis managers to the Middle East and Afghanistan, and paying host to visiting European officials, Clinton is to leave on 15 February for a tour of China, Japan, Indonesia and South Korea. She will arrive in Beijing on 20 February.
The choice of itinerary is revealing of Barack Obama’s priorities as well as Clinton’s. To some extent, the source of Clinton’s claimed expertise on foreign policy is China. She led the US delegation to the international conference on women in Beijing in 1995, delivering an unsparing speech on human rights.
Her hard-hitting speech became a staple of Clinton’s style, presented as an example of her readiness to stand up to world leaders. This time she is unlikely to be talking about human rights. It is also unlikely that she would use this visit to show how tough and confrontational she can be. Since becoming secretary of state Clinton has said that she intends to broaden America’s relationship with China beyond the economic interests that dominated George Bush’s conduct of policy.
The first item on that new agenda could well be the environment. State department officials say the focus of Clinton’s talks with Chinese officials will be energy and climate change. Clinton will be travelling with Todd Stern, the climate change envoy. In Washington the visit is being seen as an opportunity to achieve a shift in tone in relations, and open the way towards a common effort on reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Some even say the visit could be Clinton’s best chance.
The travel plans offer further evidence that Obama plans to undo Bush’s policies on climate change negotiations much as he has begun to do in the domestic arena. Obama delivered early action on the environment in a number of executive orders, restoring regulatory powers to government agencies weakened by Bush. He also created the post of climate change envoy that Stern currently holds. Now with Clinton’s trip, Obama seems to be reaffirming a commitment to dealing with energy and climate.
It is a tall order. America and China account for more than 40% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. A deal has proved elusive. Bush refused to rejoin the Kyoto protocol on climate change in 2001, arguing that China should also agree to cut emissions. The Chinese leadership countered that their economy was still developing, and that per capita emissions were still much smaller than in the US.
But while the US and China were in a diplomatic stand-off, events moved ahead on the ground. America’s withdrawal from Kyoto coincided with the rapid boom of China’s export economy, and the country turned to coal-fired power plants to fuel its factories. Attempts to reach a deal compensating China for the cost of moving away from coal to more expensive fuel sources stalled.
That gave US conservatives a convenient pretext for opposing greenhouse gas reduction. Why should America rein in its emissions until China does the same? Now – maybe – that destructive cycle can be broken.
Clinton’s trip follows reports from two Washington thinktanks earlier this month suggesting that America and China could be open to working together on climate change. The Nobel laureate, Steve Chu, helped author one of the reports before his appointment as energy secretary. Chinese officials have also been sending out signals of co-operation. At a forum at the Brookings Institution last week, Beijing’s ambassador to the US, Zhou Wenzhong, said that China and America, by working together, could help set the stage for progress at the international climate change meeting in Copenhagen in December.
"China and the United States have many shared interests and extensive areas for co-operation on energy and climate change," he said. "Co-operation between our two countries... 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," he added.
After eight years of inaction, the difficulty is how to get things started – and started quickly.
The report by the Brookings Institution suggested that Obama and China’s leader, Hu Jintao, convene a climate change summit. There were proposals for China and America to begin with shared projects to develop plug-in cars, green buildings and carbon-capture technology.
The report by the Pew Centre for Climate Change and the Asia Society, which was chaired by Chu, called for greater investment in "smart" electrical grids, and expanded use of wind and solar energy. Whether any of that materialises, however, could well depend on what sort of start Clinton makes.
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