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
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.
