Jeff Goodell :
A week after Democrats took a drubbing in the midterm elections, as pundits were suggesting President Obama should start packing up the Oval Office, he stood beside Chinese President Xi Jinping in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing and announced a historic climate deal that may be one of the most significant accomplishments of his presidency. In the works for nearly a year, the agreement unfolded in a series of secret meetings in the United States and China and was carried out with the brinkmanship and bravado of a Vegas poker game.
The agreement comes at a time when awareness of the risks of climate change has never been higher, thanks to the sobering accretion of extreme weather events around the world. But the prospects for significant action to reduce carbon pollution have never been lower. Which is why virtually everyone in the climate world was stunned when the agreement was announced on November 12th.
Negotiations started in February when Todd Stern, the State Department’s lead climate negotiator, put in an exploratory phone call to his counterpart in the Chinese government, Xie Zhenhua. Stern was in Seoul, South Korea, and would soon be joining his boss, Secretary of State John Kerry, in Beijing for a series of high-level meetings with the Chinese leadership, including Xi Jinping. Kerry, long a forceful advocate for action on climate change, simply wanted Stern to see if there was any possibility the upcoming talks might yield a joint public statement on the issue. Beyond that, the State Department team sensed that the Chinese were looking for areas of common ground to help improve relations. White House counselor John Podesta, President Obama’s de facto point person on climate, agreed that it was an idea worth pursuing.
Stern knew that Xie, with whom he has shared many dinners at climate conferences all over the world, was a straight shooter whose goal, like his own, was to actually make progress on solving the climate crisis. “I made the case that if the deal were done well, and it had enough ambition, it could help to build momentum for Paris next year,” recalls Stern. “Xie was interested. But there were obviously a lot of issues to work out. So we proceeded cautiously.”
Obama arrived in the White House in 2009 determined to take on climate change. In his first term in office, he instituted tough new automotive fuel efficiency standards and pushed through $90 billion for clean energy in the stimulus bill. But after legislation to limit CO2 pollution failed to pass in the Senate in 2010, climate change seemed to slide down the list of issues that engaged the president. That changed after his re-election, when he ordered the Environmental Protection Agency to write new rules to govern carbon emissions from power plants and brought in Podesta. Early this past summer, those plans took shape when the EPA finally announced its plan to crack down on carbon pollution from existing power plants.
But Podesta understood that no matter what the U.S. did, it wouldn’t matter without larger global cooperation. The last major round of international climate negotiations in Copenhagen in 2009 had been a festival of conspiracy and betrayal, ending with an 11th-hour, closed-door confrontation between rich and poor nations that only deepened the cynicism among many that the world would ever strike an agreement to cut carbon pollution. A year from now, the world is set to meet in Paris for another summit. Would this next meeting be any different? Probably not, concluded Podesta and the State Department’s climate negotiators, unless they could get China to the table.
It was not just because China was the world’s biggest polluter (an honor the U.S. had held until about 2006), but the Chinese also hold tremendous sway over developing nations of the world. Get China to take action, and chances were good that India, Brazil, South Korea, Mexico, Indonesia and other increasingly prosperous nations would come along too.
But moving climate to the top of the agenda, Podesta realized, would be difficult. “In China, the politics of climate change are different than in the U.S.,” says Li Shuo, a Greenpeace activist in Beijing. “No one in China denies climate change is a problem. But we have more immediate problems – like air and water pollution, most of which come from our dependence on coal.” According to one study, air pollution contributed to the premature death of 1.2 million people in China in 2010. “China today is a lot like America was in the 1960s and Seventies – the rivers are on fire, the sky polluted, and the rising middle class is not going to put up with it anymore,” says Jigar Shah, a solar-industry pioneer. For U.S. negotiators, it was important to convince the Chinese that cutting carbon pollution would not only clean up the air but also lead to more political stability for the regime. “They will have a social revolt on their hands if they don’t come up with a way of dealing with this,” U.S. Ambassador Max Baucus told me bluntly when I was in Beijing this past summer.
But for the U.S., nothing with China comes easy. “The relationship between China and the U.S. has been on a downhill slide,” says author Orville Schell, who has been writing about China since the 1970s and now heads the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society in New York. The Chinese fear the U.S. has a long-term strategy to contain China, while the U.S. fears China’s increasing strength means trouble for American interests in Asia and beyond.
On top of the rising superpower tensions, climate negotiations are made more difficult by the fact that China is a developing nation. It may be the world’s number-one polluter by volume, but its per-capita emissions are far lower than ours.
(To be continued)
