China Environmental Law

Secretary of State Clinton delivered a major address last Friday at the Asia Society on the eve of her trip to Japan, Korea, China and Indonesia.  The speech touched on a number of issues regarding Asia, but we, of course, focused on those parts of the address regarding China and environmental issues.  Climate change comes in a solid third or fourth in terms of US priorities in Asia.

When we consider the gravest global threats confronting us - financial instability and economic dislocation, terrorism and weapons of mass destruction, food security and health emergencies, climate change and energy vulnerability, stateless criminal cartels and human exploitation - it is clear that these threats do not stop at borders or oceans. Pandemics threaten school children in Jakarta and Jacksonville. Global financial crises shrink bank accounts in Sapporo and San Francisco. The dangers posed by nuclear proliferation create worries in Guangzhou as well as Washington. And climate change affects the livelihoods of farmers in China’s Hunan province and in America’s Midwest. These dangers affect us all, and therefore we all must play a role in addressing them.

Frankly, I suspect that nuclear proliferation is pretty low on the list of worries for the average person in Guangzhou, but we’ll cut the Secretary some rhetorical slack here (although from a purely speechcraft perspective, wouldn’t Wenzhou have worked better than Guangzhou, at least maintaining the alliterative theme?).

In specifically enumerating the main issues the US will focus on in its exercise of “smart power” in Asia, tackling the global financial crisis comes first, maintaining historic alliances and countering complex global threats (primarily North Korean nukes) takes the second position, and finding “[g]lobal solutions . . . essential to addressing climate change and the need for clean sources of energy,” makes it into third place.

Clinton specifically noted that she was taking United States Special Envoy for Climate Change, Todd Stern, with her “to begin the discussions that we hope will create the opportunities for cooperation.”  She acknowledged that the US “must lead efforts to cut harmful emissions and build a lower-carbon economy,” but that all “the countries” she was visiting had “a role to play in this effort.”

Orville Schell’s commentary in Time magazine this week reminds us that collaboration on clean energy and greater efficiency offers a real opportunity to deepen the overall U.S.-Chinese relationship. So we will work hard with the Chinese to create partnerships that promote cleaner energy sources, greater energy efficiency, technology transfers that can benefit both countries, and other strategies that simultaneously protect the environment and promote economic growth.

While in Beijing, I will visit a clean thermal power plant built with GE and Chinese technology. It serves as an example of the kind of job-creating, bilateral, public-private collaboration that we need so much more of.

While the tenor of the speech was generally one of cooperation and conciliation, there were hints that some potentially contentious issues will move a little higher up on the American list of agenda items.  Clinton signaled a willingness to bypass ministries and “engage civil society” directly “to strengthen the foundations needed to support good governance, free elections, and a free press, wider educational opportunities, stronger healthcare systems, religious tolerance, and human rights.”  Nevertheless, the speech is getting positive reviews in the Chinese press.

I would have liked to see climate change in at least the number two position, and more urgency expressed on the need to find a meaningful US-China plan of action on the issue.  I think climate change progress is significantly more important than North Korea’s nuclear program.  It is, nevertheless, a good sign that Stern will accompany Clinton, and that she is making a symbolic trip to some sort of clean[er?] energy plant.

At the end of Secretary Clinton’s speech, Asia Society President Vishakha Desai gushed “I just want to say that with our foreign policy in your hands, our heart [sic] is at ease.”  Let me disengage myself from this collective heart and say that I am cautiously optimistic, but not yet “at ease.”  I hope the climate change engagement that follows on from the China meetings will be concrete and urgent.