http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/49542
*State Department Says China to Get U.S. Aid under New Climate Deal* *Monday, June 15, 2009* By Matt Cover, Staff Writer [image: http://media.cnsnews.com/resources/49544.jpg] *Flag of the People's Republic of China * *(CNSNews.com) *- U.S. Special Envoy for Climate Change Todd Stern said that there was “no question” that China would receive both financial and technological assistance from the United States as part of upcoming climate change talks to be conducted in Copenhagen, Denmark. “This is a developing country issue, which includes China,” Stern told reporters on Friday. “I think there is no question that a Copenhagen agreement is going to have to include mechanisms to provide the financial flows and technological assistance to developing countries.” The Copenhagen talks are part of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC), the U.N. body responsible for negotiating the Kyoto Protocol and its successor treaty, negotiation of which will be finalized in Copenhagen this December. China, called a developing country by the U.N., is being given a special definition by U.S. negotiators who want any final agreement to reflect that despite its vast swaths of undeveloped rural countryside, China is rapidly urbanizing, boasting fully modern cities. Stern outlined this split personality, saying China was “both” a developed and a “developing” country. “I’ve said on a number of occasions now that it’s accurate that China is in effect both a developed and a developing country at this point,” said Stern. “They are developed in some of their major cities, Beijing and Shanghai, but they’re still developing and still quite poor in a large part of the countryside.” Regardless, the United States will be spreading the wealth China’s way, helping them to meet whatever final carbon emissions reduction goals come out of Copenhagen. “It [assistance] needs to focus both on mitigation – the means of producing your CO2 emissions, putting you on a low carbon path – and adaptation, which has to do with dealing with the effects of climate change that has already happened,” said Stern, then, “yes, there will need to be those [assistance] mechanisms.” Stern acknowledged that the details of precisely how the United States would assist China had yet to be worked out, explaining that there were many questions which need to be answered before December. “There are a whole host of questions that are important, issues that are important with respect to how to structure a financing mechanism: what institutions to use, what governments to use, where the sources of the money are going to come from, whether it’s between public or private markets, all of those things are under discussion,” he said. In its Input to the Negotiating Text, a skeleton proposal outlining what the United States would like the Copenhagen agreement to say, the State Department introduced a new criterion reflecting its nuanced view of China’s development. “With respect to developing country Parties whose national circumstances reflect greater responsibility or capability,” the proposal reads, before outlining that these special countries must implement their own, distinct carbon reduction plans like developed states. China is the largest emitter of carbon dioxide in the world and it, along with the third-largest emitter India have been the source of U.S. objection in international climate negotiations, with the State Department arguing that any agreement that did not reflect the two countries’ contributions to greenhouse gas emissions would be unfair. Stern said that China was finally coming around, saying that the Chinese understood that climate change could not be contained without their participation and that the size of their carbon emissions put them in a special category of polluters. “The stark reality, though, is that the world cannot contain climate change, we cannot avoid dangerous levels of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere, without very significant effort by China,” Stern said. “We talked very openly and candidly and in a lot of detail about what needs to be done on both sides to advance to a successful outcome in Copenhagen.” China, he said, would be expected to reduce their emissions below where they otherwise would be if no actions were taken. Developed countries must generally reduce their emissions below an as-yet-to-be-determined yearly level -- for example, the level of emissions in 1990 used by the Kyoto Protocol. “We are expecting China to reduce emissions very considerably compared to where they would otherwise be,” said Stern. “That’s not an absolute reduction below where they are right now, because they [China] are not quite at that point yet. In that respect, the developed and developing countries are different. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ Thanks for being part of "PoliticalForum" at Google Groups. For options & help see http://groups.google.com/group/PoliticalForum * Visit our other community at http://www.PoliticalForum.com/ * It's active and moderated. Register and vote in our polls. * Read the latest breaking news, and more. -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
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