Latest Articles by Jonathan Adams

Road to rapprochement

Banning Garrett, Jonathan Adams — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 20:30:00 +0000

By joining together to fight climate change, the United States and China have a historic opportunity to lead a global strategic transformation. Banning Garrett and Jonathan Adams introduce a new report.

In a new report released by the Asia Society’s Center on US-China Relations and the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, a group of more than 50 experts on China, politics and business aim to provide Barack Obama’s new US administration with a policy roadmap for cooperation with China. Common Challenge, Collaborative Response: A Roadmap for US-China Cooperation on Energy and Climate Change was produced by the Initiative for US-China Cooperation on Energy and Climate Task Force, co-chaired by John L Thornton, professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing, and by Steven Chu, prior to his nomination as US secretary of energy. Here, Banning Garrett and Jonathan Adams introduce the report. The full document can be downloaded in both languages here.

Nearly four decades ago, the 1971-72 US-China rapprochement led to the most far-reaching strategic transformation of the international economic, political and security order since the extraordinary set of relationships and institutions that had been established in the aftermath of World War II. Today, the United States and China have a historic opportunity to once again catalyse a strategic transformation, this time to a global low-carbon, sustainable economy to effectively mitigate the chances of catastrophic climate change while increasing global prosperity. American and Chinese leadership is critical since the two countries are the biggest developed and developing countries, the biggest consumers of energy and the biggest producers of greenhouse-gas emissions. If the US and China do not lead this generations-long effort, it is unlikely that it will occur at all – or at least not on a timetable that will achieve the global greenhouse-gas emissions reductions necessary to prevent cataclysmic climate change.

This challenge for the US, China and the rest of the world comes at a time not only of increasing threats from global warming, but also the most severe global economic crisis since the Great Depression. The economic meltdown has an immediate and daily-worsening impact while the climate-change crisis is more invisible and slow-developing – although with potentially more disastrous and long-lasting consequences. Political leaders are under great pressure to focus their attention on halting and reversing the economic death spiral that began with the global financial crisis last autumn. Failure to address global warming as part of the economic recovery effort, however, could greatly increase the long-term costs of reducing greenhouse-gas emissions and the impacts of climate change. The planned stimulus packages by the United States and China promise vast increases in government resources and directed investment, which offer great potential – if properly directed – to accelerate transition to a global low-carbon economy while pulling the world out of recession.

To establish their new strategic relationship in the early 1970s, China and the United States overcame more than 20 years of mutual isolation, ideological rivalry, and intense hostility, including fighting a hot war in Korea from 1950 to 1953, a near-conflict over Taiwan in the late 1950s, and a proxy war in Vietnam in the 1960s. While the shared objective of the US-China rapprochement was the containment and strategic isolation of the Soviet Union, the ultimate, long-term effect was to spur the peaceful demise of the Soviet Union and its eastern European empire, thereby ending the Cold War and creating one integrated world economy. The US-China rapprochement also created the international conditions for China’s successful opening to the outside and its economic reform, leading to the extraordinary reemergence of China – and the acceleration of the process of globalisation.

The US-China rapprochement of the early 1970s was based on strategic calculations and decisions by the top leaders in both countries to deal with the common strategic challenge posed by the Soviet Union. These decisions set in motion a process that led to far more massive international change than a reconfiguration of big-power relations to counterbalance rising Soviet power. The decisions at the top in the two countries unleashed a largely bottom-up process that involved daily decisions and actions of hundreds of millions of people in China and around the world, which transformed the global strategic fabric and created the increasingly interconnected, globalised world we have today.

Now, a shared strategic threat is posed by not by an external enemy but by our own efforts to achieve economic development and prosperity. The climate-change threat is more slow-moving and diffuse than the nuclear threat hanging over the Cold War, but the long-term danger to civilization may be no less existential. The response to this new strategic threat must begin like the US-China rapprochement in the 1970s, with initial decisions by the top leadership of the two nations that set in motion a long-term process that would prove to be even more transformative perhaps than initially envisioned. Similarly, key strategic decisions and concerted efforts to establish the necessary conditions for a transformation of the US and Chinese economies could unleash the creativity, resourcefulness, competitiveness and determination of millions of people and businesses to speed the world’s transition to a low-carbon, sustainable economy.

A new opportunity has emerged in both countries. US president Barack Obama has stated that mitigating climate change will be a high priority for his administration, which is committed to 80% reductions of greenhouse-gas emissions from 1990 levels by 2050. His stimulus plan includes commitment of massive resources for building a new clean energy infrastructure, greater efforts to enhance energy efficiency, and new steps to move away from dependence on fossil fuels. Although China is not yet willing to commit to emissions reduction targets, Chinese leaders have a similar perspective on the climate-change threat and the need for transition to a low-carbon economy. They are also planning to devote stimulus resources to energy efficiency, green technologies and other efforts to build a low-carbon energy infrastructure.

It is essential that both the Obama administration and the Chinese leadership engage at the highest levels to begin a new programme of significantly scaled-up cooperation on energy and climate change as soon as possible. Successful US-China cooperation on energy and climate security will substantially enhance prospects for a new international climate agreement as well as bolstering political support in each country for climate change mitigation policies. It will also build mutual trust between the United States and China, strengthen the US-China partnership for tackling a wide range of common strategic challenges in the twenty-first century, and be a constructive force in US-China relations at a point in time when the American public is increasingly sceptical of the benefits of bilateral economic integration.

Banning Garrett is director of the Initiative for US-China Cooperation on Energy and Climate

Jonathan Adams is assistant director of the Initiative for US-China Cooperation on Energy and Climate

Homepage photo from White House Photo Office/ Richard Nixon Library.

President Richard Nixon at the Great Wall, February 24, 1972.

Do we know change when we see it?

Banning Garrett, Jonathan Adams — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 06:18:00 +0000

An agreement between the US and China on climate change and clean energy may be more significant than its detractors initially supposed, write Banning Garrett and Jonathan Adams.

Did the United States and China recently take a game-changing step on climate change and clean energy? Quite possibly so. With little fanfare, and to a chorus of disappointed commentators, the two countries at the end of July committed themselves to bilateral cooperation that could catalyse a global transition to low-carbon sustainable economic development.

The US-China “Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) to Enhance Cooperation on Climate Change, Energy and the Environment” issued at the end of the “Strategic and Economic Dialogue” (SED) has been generally viewed as less than earth-shaking. But these assessments may fail to appreciate the real strategic significance of the collaborative venture China and the United States are pledging to undertake.

Much of what was agreed to in this MOU had been part of policies and agreements worked out during the Bush administration, and for this reason it has been easy for many commentators to discount. But as they have parsed the statements, commitments and rhetoric about what was or was not agreed with a skeptical eye, many have missed the new strategic framework provided by this agreement.

This could all be boilerplate rhetoric with little long-term significance. Certainly, the MOU will have little strategic impact without serious, sustained follow through to realise the ambitious agenda of cooperation outlined in the agreement. But there is reason to believe that the two governments may actually follow through on their commitments and a long-term collaborative project with strategic implications will be undertaken.

First, the leadership of the two countries at the highest level now endorses climate-change science and takes seriously climate change as a critical strategic threat to both nations and the world. This is a major change that has taken place in China over the last two years and in the United States with the advent of the Obama administration. Second, the two governments are both committed to scaled-up domestic actions to implement policies aimed at transitioning their economies to clean-energy systems and low-carbon development. Third, the strong and public commitment by the leaders of the two countries to both meet the climate-change challenge and to engage in unprecedented US-China cooperation is a new and essential ingredient to energise the two governments at all levels and the two business communities to vastly scale up their collaborative as well as national efforts. Fourth, international and public pressure will continue to increase on the two biggest consumers of energy and producers of greenhouse-gas emissions to take effective and far-reaching steps to reduce their emissions and to cooperate with international efforts to reduce global emissions.

The prospects for success in this effort are quite uncertain, of course. Transforming the energy infrastructure of the two countries and of the rest of the world is a huge, expensive and multi-decade task that faces many obstacles and hurdles. The fight in the US Congress over establishing a “cap-and-trade” system is indicative of the strength and persistence of the interests that are threatened by change. China, too, has its vested interests who fear they will be losers in an energy transition or simply that the cost will be too high and economic growth will slow, creating social unrest and political instability.

There is one virtual certainty, however, which is that if the United States and China do not implement their new commitment to combat climate change, build clean energy systems and transition to low-carbon economies, the rest of the world is not likely to do so – and it may not matter whether they do or not. The US and China alone are currently on trajectories to produce more greenhouse gases than the world as a whole can be allowed to emit without crossing the climate change threshold limit of increasing the global temperature by 2 degrees Celsius.

It is unlikely the senior Chinese and American officials gathered for the SED were thinking about a multi-generational strategic commitment to transforming the world economic system. But there is a reasonable chance that a decade or two from now, their humble MOU will be pointed to as a historic turning point that marked a strategic shift as important in its global impact as the US-China opening nearly 40 years ago, which started with the secret July 1971 visit to Beijing by then national security adviser Henry Kissinger.

That visit and the subsequent US-China rapprochement played a key – if unanticipated – role in the transformation of the global strategic environment, ultimately contributing to the collapse of the Soviet Union, the end of the Cold War, the creation of one world economy, the re-emergence of China and the acceleration of globalisation. It may be that the US and China will reprise the strategic impact of their historic rapprochement by catalysing a global strategic transformation to sustainable, low-carbon development.

The MOU does not lay out such grandiose aims, of course. But the US-China agreement makes a number of critical points that set out both the strategic challenges and the aims of the US-China partnership on climate change and low-carbon transformation. First, this cooperation is based on a common understanding of the strategic threat faced by the two countries: “climate change, clean and efficient energy and environmental protection are among the greatest challenges facing the United States and China.” Second, the statement asserts the key role of US-China collaboration, noting that “cooperation between the United States and China is critical to enhancing energy security, combating climate change, and protecting the environment and natural resources…” Third, by implication, the agreement affirms that far-reaching and effective US-China cooperation is not only necessary, but also possible – and it sets out the framework for greatly deepening, broadening and accelerating this cooperation. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the MOU asserts that “both countries intend to transition to a low-carbon economy…”

Indeed, the most important change—advocated by many critics calling for increased energy and climate cooperation between the United States and China—was the need to raise the issue to a strategic level. Many would agree that only with a strategic focus, fully backed by the top leaderships of the two countries, would it be possible to set out a long-term strategy that can be implemented and scaled up to achieve concrete goals that result in real change. Now that may have happened.

Banning Garrett is the director of the Asia Program at the Atlantic Council of the United States

Jonathan Adams is an associate in the Climate and Energy Program at the World Resources Institute

Homepage image from US Department of the Treasury. Treasury secretary Timothy Geithner and Chinese vice premier Wang Qishan at the Strategic and Economic Dialogue meeting in Washington in July.