Obama Needs China to Help Him Run Great Green Race

Nov. 19 (Bloomberg)—It was a happy accident that Barack Obama found himself in Beijing on the day the U.S. Senate kicked climate change legislation into the spring. Obama needs Chinese President Hu Jintao’s help to break the U.S. stalemate over global warming. And until Washington acts, there’s scant chance for a binding international agreement to reduce greenhouse gases.

Obama is reluctant to commit the U.S. to emission targets at the United Nations climate talks in Copenhagen next month because he doesn’t want to get ahead of Congress. (The Clinton administration got too far in front with the Kyoto Protocol, and the Senate never ratified it.) Obama hasn’t been able to get a climate bill through the Senate in part because Americans believe, with some justification, that more manufacturing jobs will move to China if the U.S. caps greenhouse gas emissions and China doesn’t.

China won’t commit to binding reductions, and as a developing country, it isn’t required to by the UN climate change process. Yet it wants the U.S. to slash greenhouse gas emissions by 40 percent in 10 years, an unrealistic demand. The Chinese argue that since the U.S. had a 100-year head start on getting rich by sending carbon into the skies, it’s only fair for America to begin reducing first. Obama agrees with that, but may not be able to convince the Senate to get started unless Hu gives him something more to work with.

Next Stop, Copenhagen

In Beijing, Hu and Obama signaled that help might be coming. Their joint declaration suggested that the U.S. would put a number on the table in Copenhagen if China offered a real proposal of its own. “An agreed outcome at Copenhagen,” it said, should include “emission reduction targets of developed countries and nationally appropriate mitigation actions of developing countries.”

This doesn’t mean China will agree to binding cuts in Copenhagen. It won’t. But if it takes the first step down that path—by pledging to make reductions and to measure, verify and report the results—it would go a long way toward calming American concerns. The U.S. will only go first if it knows that China is following it down the same road.