Posted on 12/29/2013 8:00:21 AM PST by Cincinatus' Wife
BEIJING — The Obama administration's push to help clean up China is emerging as a bright spot in a relationship rife with economic and strategic tensions.
The failure of the world's two largest economies to agree on tough carbon emissions limits four years ago doomed substantial progress on climate change and left each side blaming the other.
Since the Copenhagen talks, however, the U.S. and China have ramped up their environmental cooperation as repeated outbreaks of thick, acrid smog have virtually shut down major Chinese cities and cost the country hundreds of billions of dollars a year.
“For a period of time the two countries sort of used each other as sort of an excuse not to take much action. But now I think there's a better opportunity,” said Ma Jun, a leading Chinese environmentalist and director of the nonprofit Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs in Beijing. “Together I think we can make a huge contribution to global pollution control.”
The recent pollution scares have awakened the Chinese government to the dangers of unbridled economic growth at the expense of the environment. Policymakers and activists are looking to the U.S. for guidance because of its own experience passing environmental legislation such as the Clean Air Act, said Barbara Finamore, director of the China program at the New York-based Natural Resources Defense Council.
“What I see happening here is the public concern driving public policy,” Finamore told The Hill. “It's similar in some ways to what happened [in the U.S.] in the late 1960s, early 1970s.”
Recent examples of cooperation include a renewed pledge by the U.S. and China to tackle climate change, efforts by U.S. companies to force their Chinese suppliers to clean up their operations and advice from the Environmental Protection Agency on laws and regulations China should consider.
“China and the U.S. are the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions. We are the largest economies. We have the largest energy demand,” EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy told CNN during a visit to Hong Kong earlier this month. “If the two of us can work together, we can become a model for other countries to follow.”
Beijing and local governments are clamoring for U.S. technologies for air monitoring and pollution control, McCarthy said.
“[China] has made a much more committed effort to take a look at these issues and try to work through them,” she told CNN. “That's why EPA is here, trying to provide support to that exercise.”
EPA efforts have included working with the Chinese government to develop a cap on sulfur dioxide emissions and promote cleaner fuels. The next step: Requiring factories to report their emissions, as they're required to do in the United States and across Europe.
“In China we have more than 20 major environmental legislations regulating all kinds of things,” said Ma. “But there's one major gap: The factories don't have to release what kinds of pollutants they release and how much.”
Finamore said her group is working with the EPA and activists on getting China to adopt such standards.
“We're launching a new project with Ma Jun to try to promote the establishment of a system for corporations to report their emissions on a regular basis and to make sure it's enforced,” she said.
The Chinese public's demands for more information has in turn made it possible for consumers around the world to demand accountability from U.S. and other firms that rely on China's role as the “workshop to the world.” Ma's group has created a national pollution map tracking some 100,000 factories and worked with U.S. firms such as Apple to get them to force their Chinese suppliers to cut down on pollution.
“Consumers can enjoy cheaper products made in China but during the process we do have a problem of much of the waste getting dumped in our back yards, contaminating the soil, the aquifer, the waterways and the air,” Ma said. “When we started engaging with some of the brands they'd say, 'oh, sorry, I don't know who is polluting and who is not so I just buy from the cheapest.' But that's no longer true.”
Finamore credited Secretary of State John Kerry for the improved cooperation over the past year. She pointed notably to this April's climate change agreement calling for both countries to take “forceful, nationally appropriate action … including large-scale cooperative action”
“The idea was, by working together in areas of common interest, it would build trust between the two countries that would carry over into the negotiating table,” she said. “And I think it has. During the last round of climate negotiations [in Warsaw last month] it was a much different tone than in Copenhagen.”
Ma said both countries share a “global responsibility” to tackle pollution as the world's “worst greenhouse gas emitters.”
“Since we share this earth, we need to understand that when all the countries try to join the rich man's club, each of us needs to make an effort if we don't want this only mother planet to be destroyed,” he said. “We all need to cooperate.”
A surge in coal exports from the port of Baltimore has turned the Chesapeake Bay into a maritime parking lot.
Demand from China, India and other countries for high-priced metallurgic coal to fuel steel production has grown so strong that ships are backed up south of the bridge waiting to gain a berth at one of Baltimore's two coal terminals...."
You can’t/won’t “help clean up” when China has been adding 2.5 coal fired plants per month, for YEARS!
80% of these new plants are DIRTY, high sulfur coal.
Just to clarify for any trolls who may think the watermelon reference is "racist". It actually refers to the true nature of many of these so-called environmentalists: "green on the outside, red on the inside". Especially the ones in the current administration.
"Goal is complete revolution"...
VAN JONES (Obama's former 'Green Jobs Czar')
YouTube:
"Valerie Jarrett, Senior Advisor to President Obama, speaks [lovingly] about Green Job Czar, Van Jones, at the Netroots Convention on August 12, 2009. Then Van Jones speaks about [a COMMUNIST] transforming [of] the whole society."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TnDxzvc0OXk&feature=related
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VAN JONES SHOCK ADMISSION [in his own words]: "Goal is Complete Revolution"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fh4Z0V0zNQg
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Here is the transcript of the above YouTube video:
“Right after Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat if the civil rights leaders had jumped out and said OK now we want reparations for Slavery, we want redistribution of all the wealth, and we want to legalize mixed marriages. If we’d come out with a maximum program the very next day, they’d been laughed at. Instead they came out with a very minimum. “We just want to integrate these busses…”
But, inside that minimum demand was a very radical kernel that eventually meant that from 1964 to 1968 complete revolution was on the table for this country.
And, I think that this green movement has to pursue those same steps and stages.
Right now we say we want to move from suicidal gray capitalism to something eco-capitalism where at least we’re not fast-tracking the destruction of the whole planet. Will that be enough? No, it won’t be enough. We want to go beyond the systems of exploitation and oppression all together. But, that’s a process and I think that’s what’s great about the movement that is beginning to emerge is that the CRISIS is so severe in terms of joblessness, violence and now ecological threats that people are willing to be both pragmatic and visionary.
So the green economy will start off as a small subset and we are going to push it and push it and push it until it becomes the engine for transforming the whole society.
SOURCE for this transcript (it matches the video):
http://ironicsurrealism.blogivists.com/2009/09/02/van-jones-obamas-green-czar-%E2%80%98green-jobs%E2%80%99-goal-is-%E2%80%98complete-revolution%E2%80%99-away-from-%E2%80%98gray-capitalism%E2%80%99/
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Here's the original source for the Van Jones quote about the time he spent in jail following the Rodney King/LA riots (Jones was arrested in "peaceful" protests in San Fran). It was in a 2005 interview he did with East Bay Express. They of course (what else?) claim he "renounced his rowdy Black Nationalist ways" since then (yet he's calling for "complete revolution" in Aug 2009! ...see above):
But in jail, he said, "I met all these young radical people of color -- I mean really radical, communists and anarchists. And it was, like, 'This is what I need to be a part of.'" Although he already had a plane ticket, he decided to stay in San Francisco. "I spent the next ten years of my life working with a lot of those people I met in jail, trying to be a revolutionary." In the months that followed, he let go of any lingering thoughts that he might fit in with the status quo. "I was a rowdy nationalist on April 28th, and then the verdicts came down on April 29th," he said. "By August, I was a communist."
http://www.eastbayexpress.com/gyrobase/the-new-face-of-environmentalism/Content?oid=1079539&showFullText=true
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The 1992 LA/Rodney King riots were instigated by the Revolutionary Communist Party...
From David Horowitz's FrontpageMag.com /DiscoverTheNetworks.org:
"Throughout its history, one of RCP's [Revolutionary Communist Party] principal objectives has been to foment civil unrest in the United States. The most notable example of such efforts occurred on April 29, 1992, when RCP members looted and trashed the downtown and government districts of Los Angeles, triggering the infamous Rodney King riots. During the days immediately preceding the violence, RCP -- which maintained close ties to the L.A. gangs known as the Crips and the Bloods -- had circulated throughout South Central Los Angeles a leaflet featuring a statement by RCP National Spokesman Carl Dix, titled 'It's Right To Rebel' -- a quote popularized by Mao Zedong.
Encouraged by Dix, RCP activists helped lead the riots that would leave 58 people dead, more than 2,300 people injured, some 5,300 buildings burned, and $1 billion in property damaged or destroyed. On the ten-year anniversary of the rioting, RCP member Joseph Veale fondly recalled the violence as 'the most beautiful, the most heroic civil action in the history of the United States.'"
http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/groupProfile.asp?grpid=6197
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"Jones was the leader and founder of a radical group, the communist revolutionary organization Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement, or STORM. That group, together with Jones' Elle Baker Center for Human Rights, led a vigil Sept. 12, 2001, at Snow Park in Oakland, Calif.
STORM's official manifesto, titled, "Reclaiming Revolution," surfaced on the Internet."--via TheObamaFile
http://www.leftspot.com/blog/files/docs/STORMSummation.pdf
Lol!
Lordy.
Thank you.
I know you’re right. It’s just that I don’t think like the Left. I never took “dog whistle” 101.
You are correct. Communists are GREEN on the outside and RED on the inside.
Nice job by The Hill’s “journalist” Julian Pecquet to conflate smog, particulates and other similar pollutants with so-called greenhouse gas emissions.
His masters at the Ministry of Truth will certainly be pleased. No doubt he will be a strong contender for the next award of the Vladimir Lenin Medal of Freedom (although the smart money says that EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy is in the lead).
The Chinese have a billion and a half people to burn through, and a communist government that will gladly shovel them into the furnace for a fistful of US dollars, and will play along with the west if it means more yankee dollars and technology for them. Life is cheap and disposable for your diehard communist, and do not forget, WE are in a business partnership with communists. Get into bed with the devil, and don’t complain when you get royally screwed.
Sulfur Dioxide=pollution. Carbon Dioxide=envirowacko scam.
“the U.S. and China have ramped up their environmental cooperation as repeated outbreaks of thick, acrid smog have virtually shut down major Chinese cities and cost the country hundreds of billions of dollars a year.”
Exactly how does the smog “cost the country hundreds of billions of dollars a year?”
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