Last week, the United States and China, the most prolific emitters of carbon emissions in the world, agreed on a joint energy research center, where it will focus on “coal and clean buildings and vehicles” that will seek to “create thousands of [American] jobs,” according the U.S. Secretary of Energy Steven Chu, who is currently in China working on a collaborative agreement between the two giants of pollution.
This is the first step of a slowly budding partnership between the United States and China that has, to put it lightly, been struggling with compromise for the last couple of months on energy policy and emissions reductions. A month ago, at the U.N. intercessional climate meeting in Bonn, Germany (Bonn II) on curbing carbon emissions ended in a relative failure, without creating anything substantial to prepare the world for Copenhagen.
The United States and China, whom some refer to as the powerful ‘G2,’ have clashed on a number of issues regarding climate change, including the respective degrees to which carbon emissions should be cut. China continually claims that the United States’ cuts on emissions “do not go far enough,” while it firmly maintains that it will not accept caps on its emissions, indicating that it has been polluting for a much shorter length of time. China, home of the world’s largest wind energy market and the largest solar panel manufacturing industry, has poured billions and billions into their energy sector, focusing more on subsidizing government-owned projects rather then contracting with private or foreign companies. Continue reading ‘A Green Way Forward? US/China Launches Joint Energy Research Center’
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