美中全球议题对话项目

U.S. and Chinese leaders start from different places when thinking about climate change. For China, key considerations include the facts that the cumulative historic emissions of greenhouse gases by the United States vastly exceed those of China; that the per capita emissions of the United States are about five times those of China; and that the United States is at a stage of development where urbanization, industrialization, and basic infrastructure development have already taken place. For the United States, key considerations are that China is the largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world; that Chinese greenhouse gas emissions are on a steep upward curve, unlike U.S. emissions; that the U.S. legacy infrastructure could be expensive to reconfigure and retrofit; that lifestyles in the United States are deeply embedded and would be hard (and politically costly) to change; and that, regardless of other considerations, China must reduce its projected emissions very substantially for the world to keep carbon levels in the atmosphere low enough to avoid risk of considerable danger for the world as a whole.

These different perspectives have been exceedingly difficult to resolve because each has objective merit and because each has a potentially great impact on responsibilities for addressing the problem. Unfortunately, neither side’s perspective, if narrowly adhered to, provides a foundation for bilateral cooperation or multilateral agreement on these topics.

Asking either country to give up expressing its perspective on these issues is unrealistic. The views are too grounded in objective realities and too deeply entrenched. However each side can respect the points the other is making and not seek to delegitimize those points. The operable principle should be that each side should not only state its own views but also explicitly recognize the other’s perspective, validating it to the extent possible. Both sides should agree that, within this context, it is important to find practical ways to achieve a set of win-win-win (domestic, bilateral, global) outcomes.

The United States and China have complementary strengths with regards to technology development. The United States has a relative lead in terms of human capital, basic science research, and the ability to move breakthroughs from research to commercialization. China has a keener grasp of what will work in developing countries, has its own substantial technical capabilities, and can provide good conditions for test beds and scaling up. It is also often able to manufacture products more rapidly and cheaply than the United States.

Technological cooperation between the two countries has tremendous potential to help advance clean energy and fight global warming. Technologies are typically developed to optimize outcomes under particular circumstances. Co-development linking U.S. and Chinese efforts would be a powerful approach to reducing emissions of greenhouse gases in each country.

Many joint technology projects will primarily entail the private sector and private research labs, think tanks, and universities. The two governments can, nevertheless, take measures to encourage and enable the link-ups that will produce results. First, the two governments should find methods to build bridges between pertinent people and projects on both sides. This might entail funding databases and research, promoting public-private partnerships, and encouraging specific exchanges. All of this will work better if the two governments explicitly agree to make co-development of emissions reduction technologies a major sphere of joint initiative. Both sides can contribute funds to these efforts, and it should be possible, with government assistance, to mobilize international financial support at some level.

The nature and scale of technology cooperation will depend on the ability of each side to meet the concerns of the other. U.S. partners will ask questions about the ability of Chinese partners to protect intellectual property and enforce contracts setting forth rules with respect to the use of technology. Chinese partners will ask questions about concessional financing. There is ample room for the United States and China to work together to answer these questions and address concerns.

If the senior leaders of the United States and China agree on this approach, they should seek to announce a few major joint projects that would highlight the commitment to the new effort and capture the public’s imagination. Possibilities include pilot projects to capture and store carbon dioxide emissions from coal plants and joint efforts to develop and promote electric vehicles.

Under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, the United States and other industrialized countries assumed specific responsibilities with respect to technology transfer to developing countries. These responsibilities were re-affirmed under the recent Bali accord. One challenge in meeting these obligations is that, in the United States, much of the potentially relevant technology belongs to private sector companies. Projects of the kind described above can help fulfill obligations under the Framework Convention while reducing emissions and spurring economic growth.

Haile Chen is a junior at Tsinghua University in Beijing, majoring in construction management and minoring in finance.