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.
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