The New York Times has now jumped into the US-China “secret” climate change meeting fray. In an article strangely entitled “Secret Meeting Between U.S. and China Broke New Ground on Climate Change,” it is conclusively demonstrated that the meetings were neither secret nor ground-breaking. If you are bored with this whole affair here’s the bottom line:
[Frank] Loy [former Undersecretary of State] said the group was able to delve into the positions of both countries and gain better understandings about the political realities both countries face. Yet as to reaching a global deal in Copenhagen, Loy said, little progress was made.
“There were things that we learned, but it wasn’t a totally radical or surprising conversation. We knew a great deal about China’s views before,” he said. The discussions were “more informal and occasionally more substantive and frank, but Mr. Xie [Zhenhua, China's chief delegate to the U.N. climate negotiations] is a cautious person.”
In other words, this is a non-story. You can go on about your business now if you like.
In the NYT retelling there is no reference to the “20% cut in carbon emissions by 2010″ or Bush administration climate progressiveness. Despite the NYT headline, the organizers of the talks admit they were not “secret,” they were just not “heavily advertised.”
The attendees don’t appear, however to have reached a consensus on what can and can not be revealed about the substance of the talks. At one point in the NYT story the talks are described as “off the record,” at another point we are told that “the group members consented to the ‘Chatham House Rule,’ under which they agreed they could repeat generally what was discussed, but not identify who said what.” Then, however, one of the major sources for the article is quoted extensively telling us “who,” in fact “said what:”
“Frank was pushing Xie on ‘What can you guys really commit to?’” Chandler recalled. He said Loy, who at the time was advising then-presidential candidate Barack Obama, told Xie, “If we’re elected, we’re going to take action. But first we need to know what you can do.”
As for the significance of the talks, we have Loy’s “little progress was made” comments above. Taiya Smith, a former Bush administration operative, is quoted as saying that progress was made but “not in a concrete way.”
Smith was apparently afflicted with the syndrome that turns some Americans into Gomer Pyle when listening to Chinese officials talk about their climate change actions. I’ll address that syndrome and what appears to be a developing consensus about where China needs to be in terms of climate commitments at Copenhagen tomorrow.
You may be feeling a bit used by the major media and those who source it stories after this whole affair. I don’t blame you. The media needs to be held accountable. I like the work of the Guardian’s reporters in China, and I think their current China at the Crossroads series has been well done, with one notable exception. With respect to that exception, I have notified the Guardian’s reader complaint service that I think a correction or retraction should be made in their “China and US held secret talks on climate change deal” story. It is still not clear whether the errors in the story were made by the reporter or those who sourced the story. I hope my complaint to the newspaper will shed some light on that issue. I will keep you posted on the paper’s response.
As I take my leave today let me suggest two honest headlines for this story:
Talks you never heard of made “little progress.”
or
Non-heavily advertised confab made progress, but “not in a concrete way.”
[walks off stage muttering "Shazam!", "Gaaawl-ly" and "Surprise, surprise, surprise!"]