China Environmental Law

We mentioned last week that the Treasury Department’s Advisory Committee on the Ten Year Energy and Environment Cooperation Framework (TYF) held its first meeting on January 15.  A few of you may be have wondered what was discussed.  Well, now we know, thanks to the indispensable US-China Business Council’s Energy & Environmental Technologies Update (if your company is a member of USCBC (check here) and you want to subscribe to the Upate, go here):

The members discussed among themselves what the TYF should focus on and put forth many recommendations such as: 

• reducing energy intensity
• developing coal as a resource
• reducing dependence on oil
• market-based pricing mechanisms
• enhancing multi-pollutant regulatory systems
• enabling markets to value and prefer more sustainable products
• examining each sector to see what leverage can be applied to bring about lower carbon emissions
• commercializing carbon capture and storage technology
• protecting US technology  

Outside of the topics recommend for discussion under the TYF, the committee did not offer specific direction addressing these topics with their PRC counterparts.  In addition, with the change in US administrations it is not clear how the TYF will be managed in the future.

Words almost fail me.  A list!  A list of recommendations! A list of recommendations that could have been generated after a five minute conversation with the experts at DOE or EPA (or the man on the street of average intelligence) or, for that matter, after five minutes on Google!  Oh I beseech thee God of Fiscal Responsibility, please grant that no taxpayer funds were spent on this meeting.  Will a grown up please review the need for this committee (at least as presently constituted)?  What an embarrassment!