China and U.S. try to speed global climate strategy

The NYT reports: Senior American and Chinese officials urged their governments today to accelerate joint efforts to reduce pollution, even as their diplomats appeared at odds over crucial elements of a global strategy to fight climate change to be considered in Copenhagen in December.

The calls for cooperation, led by Vice Premier Li Keqiang, came at a clean energy forum attended by nearly 200 of both nations’ leading experts on climate change issues and technologies. The forum’s primary goal is to devise new ways in which Chinese and American researchers, corporations and others can work together to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

But with the Copenhagen conference barely 45 days away, one subtext was to build momentum for closer collaboration between the world’s two biggest producers of greenhouse gases. Negotiations toward a new global climate change agreement have been hobbled by disagreements between China and the United States over whether curbing climate change should be principally the developed world’s duty and how much money and technology rich nations should give developing nations to help them cut greenhouse gases.

The prospect that Copenhagen may not produce a landmark accord increases the need for Beijing and Washington to move quickly on their own, officials and analysts here suggested.

“What China has going on now is real, it’s substantial,” Barbara Finamore, the director of the Natural Resources Defense Council’s China Clean Energy Program, said in an interview on Thursday. The Copenhagen talks will produce some progress, she said, “but Copenhagen is a long-term process.”