Looking at the deliverables from President Obama and Chinese President Hu Jintao’s first summit is a lot like looking at the box score on the sports pages: it only tells part of the story. Sometimes, the best plays — astute defense, patience in the pitch count, taking the charge — won’t manifest in the final readout, but they could be the game-changing plays.

At first glance, the results of the summit were a mixed bag. The trip, at times, seemed to highlight the differences between the United States and China more than it did to deliver results. There was agreement on the need for free trade but also mutual finger-pointing on currency and protectionism, recognition of the progress in the Strait but the same catechisms on arms sales and One-China.

Perhaps the biggest loser was human rights. To be fair, President Obama did speak directly to President Hu about the issue, asserting “America’s bedrock beliefs that all men and women possess certain fundamental human rights,” and urging Chinese leaders to meet with the Dalai Lama. But at the end of the day, what some deem as President Obama’s more practical approach resulted in some missed opportunities. Unlike in past presidential summits, China didn’t release any political dissidents as a symbol of goodwill. Indeed, China went the opposite direction and detained activists before the President Obama’s arrival. The Obama team did not meet with any political activists or dissident leaders in China, nor did they directly reference China’s human rights record on the trip. The president’s much-publicized call for greater internet freedom was, ironically, censored in China. And ultimately, President Obama’s more conciliatory approach seemed to soft-pedal human rights.

But there was progress, too. Obama and Hu recommitted to improving and increasing military exchanges, programs, and dialogue and have laid out an affirmative agenda focusing on law enforcement and counterterrorism. They reaffirmed a unified approach to the crisis on the Korean peninsula. On non-proliferation, Presidents Obama and Hu agreed to work together to achieve a successful Review Conference of Parties to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons in 2010 and supported the launching of negotiations on the Fissile Material Cut-off Treaty at an early date in the Conference on Disarmament. Most surprising was the progress made on climate change. So, all in all, a mixed tally.

But what the score, and many accounts of the trip, won’t reflect is the important contributions that President Obama’s trip made to U.S.-China relations. There were three intangibles that we cannot overlook. First, he signaled that the United States is back in Asia, ready to assume its role as an engaged Pacific power once again. Second, his remarks at the joint press conference with President Hu on Tuesday threw support and momentum behind sustaining the U.S.-China dialogue at the highest levels in both governments. Third, he made clear to the Chinese and to the American audiences at home, that, like it or not, on the big issues — security, economy, climate change — we’re in this together.

Earlier this week, as he prepared to leave for Asia, President Obama called the U.S. relationship with China a “strategic partnership.” This is a big move. The term is an upgrade from President Bush’s label “constructive and cooperative and candid” and a far cry from Bush’s campaign term “strategic competitor.” President Obama’s comments are 100% certain to be met with accusations of appeasement and naivete by the not-always-so-loyal opposition. The neocons didn’t like the concept of “strategic reassurance” that Deputy Secretary of State Jim Steinberg unveiled a few weeks ago, and spoke about at a recent event, and they are going to like this even less. But using this term before his first visit is a very smart move.

First, let’s be clear about what President Obama said and the context in which he said it. In response to a reporter’s question about how he views China, President Obama began by saying that he sees China as “a vital partner, as well as a competitor.” Later he stated that “on critical issues, whether climate change, economic recovery, nuclear non-proliferation, it’s very hard to see how we succeed or China succeeds in our respective goals without working together. And that is, I think, the purpose of the strategic partnership.”

So it is clear, in case you hear otherwise, that President Obama does not think China is our best friend. In addition to calling China a “competitor,” he went on to say that he raises human rights, “universal rights” he called them, in every meeting with the Chinese. We know that he hasn’t hesitated to anger Beijing when policy calls for that, as his controversial decision on trade sanctions on Chinese tires illustrates. In fact, the entire trip itinerary makes clear that China is only one element of US Asia policy. President Obama is strengthening our traditional alliances in Japan and South Korea, and finally getting the US in the game of multilateral diplomacy in APEC and ASEAN on which China has been running the tables over the last eight years.

Obama referred to a strategic partnership with China in the context of major transnational threats. China is the world’s largest emitter of carbon, its most dynamic large economy and a nuclear power that neighbors North Korea and buys more oil from Iran than any other country. If China isn’t our partner, then we are in trouble.

The problem is that China has not been a reliable partner. It has been reluctant to take the kind of proactive steps on global challenges that the US wants and needs it to. As I detail in a new report, China is very engaged in all the international institutions and very prepared at the international summits—and this is a big step in the right direction—but you can count on a couple of fingers the number of times China has taken proactive leadership on a global threat: (1) North Korea (but it took enormous and constant US pressure to get them to lead on the Six Party Talks) and (2) the avian and swine flu pandemics, but on those their active leadership has consisted of convening international conferences, not exactly a mind-blowing example of international problem-solving.

Beijing is not using its leverage with Iran to end its nuclear program, it has so far resisted agreeing to limits on its carbon emissions that would make a necessary global deal to address climate change possible, and the steps China is taking to move to a domestic-led growth model that will address global economic imbalances are welcome but too few and too slow.

What the Chinese will tell you is that they achieve a trusting relationship by, first, developing trust with their counterpart and only then doing things together. This is exactly reverse, they will say, of Americans, who want to get things done together and develop trust in the process. President Obama’s gesture gives China’s leaders some strategic reassurance that he has a positive view of the relationship. He is offering a modicum of pre-trust that the Chinese say they need. This is not weakness — it is clever diplomacy.

If, over time, the Chinese do not cooperate more deeply, then “strategic partnership” will fail to become an accurate description of the relationship. The term could end up just a blip in the historical fluctuations of US-China terminology. But instead I hope that, in a few years, it turns out to be a positive, accurate and unremarkable description of our relationship with China.

China’s energy sector gets a bad reputation because of its heavy reliance on coal, which accounts for 80 percent of its electricity supply, and its continued appetite to expand coal power capacity at a rate of two coal power plants a week. While all of this is true, it’s not the full story.

The plants that China is currently building are some of the most efficient in the industry. And as the Wall Street Journal reported today, China has a concurrent program of shutting down small, inefficient coal plants:

The National Energy Administration said Thursday that since 2007 it had closed 54 gigawatts of coal- and oil-fired power plants as part of the cleanup plan. That would amount to about 7% of China’s current electricity-generating capacity.

According to the Associated Press, this capacity translates to a closure of “7,467 generating units, meeting a previously announced goal 18 months ahead of schedule.”

These reports come a few days after Greenpeace China released a report entitled “Polluting Power: Ranking of China’s Power Companies,” which analyzes China’s ten biggest power companies across various metrics such as coal consumption, carbon dioxide emissions, and share of renewable power. In sensationalistic fashion, Reuters tried to put an unhelpful gloss to Greenpeace’s report by proclaiming in a headline “Emissions of 3 big China power firms exceed UK,” conjuring images of ecological apocalypse. The Guardian has a similar headline.

No doubt, China’s reliance on coal makes it a leading carbon emitter, but this is hardly news. To say that “greenhouse gas emissions from the three biggest Chinese power firms in 2008 were higher than those of the entire United Kingdom” is rather meaningless without context.

We need to ask — how big are these firms? It is certainly not the case that China’s biggest three power plants are matching the entire UK in carbon emissions. China’s three biggest utility companies, with fleets of hundreds and hundreds of power plants accountable for 30 percent of the entire power supply for China and its 1.3 billion people (30 percent x 1.3 billion = 390 million), match the carbon emissions output of the entire economy of the UK and its 61 million citizens. Viewed in that light, China isn’t doing that badly.

The Greenpeace report is actually much more balanced and hopeful than the Reuters and Guardian headlines indicate. It rightfully points out the challenges that China’s biggest power firms face in terms of carbon emissions and environmental costs, but it also recognizes China’s achievements in increasing coal combustion efficiency and increasing renewable energy share in certain circumstances, in addition to its active program of shutting down plants.

Sensational headlines conveying half-truths can do much more harm than good. If we are to actively engage China in international energy and climate cooperation, we need to have an accurate understanding of what’s really happening there on the ground.

In an exclusive interview with Todd Stern, the U.S. special envoy for climate change, I discussed the challenge of ensuring a successful climate partnership with China, now the world’s greatest annual emitter of global warming pollution. Ahead of his visit to Beijing next week to meet with his Chinese counterpart, Stern was asked if he will discuss the problem of accurately accounting for carbon emissions — known among climate negotiators as “measuring, reporting, and verifying” (MRV). Stern replied that the way China’s actions “might be quantified” will “absolutely be part of the discussion,” but explained that he considered specific accountability mechanisms a lower-level concern:

I don’t think we’re going to be having a kind of textual discussion at this point with the senior people that I’m going to be dealing to actually try to be drafting what the text of an MRV provision would look like in an overall agreement. But implicitly that will be an important part of the discussion, because transparency and what the numbers add up to, whether it’s China, the US, Europe, Japan, or Brazil, it’s highly important, because it’s the thing that tells us if we’re going to be on track to do what we need to do over the next several decades.

Watch it:

In fact, MRV has to be the foundation of a new global accord to solve the climate change problem — if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it. But one has to really wonder if China is up to the task. Much has been written about the lack of accountability, transparency and enforceability in China’s governance system. Moving towards a system of open information and transparent reporting, let alone accountability, will require a real cultural shift. Building the capacity to accurately collect and report emissions data — potentially politically sensitive for Chinese institutions — will be a long and gradual process that must reach into the provincial and municipal and local levels.

The challenge is especially daunting, considering that 55 percent of the population remains in underdeveloped rural areas where local governments have scarce budgetary and technical resources. Cooperative efforts like the pilot carbon registry in southern China are fantastic starting points because they demonstrate success at a smaller local level. As the Chinese become more comfortable with the concept of an accountable carbon registry, such efforts should be extended, accelerated, and replicated in other parts or sectors of China.

In the interview, Stern also recognized China’s impressive efforts on clean energy but also cautioned that China must do more. The International Energy Agency projects that China is on course for a 70 percent increase in emissions to 12 gigatons of carbon dioxide emissions in 2030. If China commits in some kind of international agreement to efforts that change that outlook, “that could be highly important”:

What we’ve said with respect to China and other major developing countries is that they need to take a set of real actions, that they should be able to quantify them, that they need to commit to them in an international context, and that they need to add up to something that puts us on track to be in the general vicinity of what science tells us we need to do. So, the IEA projection is just a business-as-usual projection, not taking into account policy changes and policy measures that we hope the Chinese will do. They’ve already, as I’ve said, they’ve done a lot, but they need to do a lot more. So, if they do a bunch of things and if that turns out to be a substantial move off their business-as-usual curve, that could be highly important.

If China is going to play constructive role a new global consensus in Copenhagen, it is apparent that China is going to have to commit to a course that takes it down from this trajectory.

We’re starting later! It’s unfortunate, but it’s just the reality. We can’t rewrite the last eight years, so we’re starting later.

Watch it:

Recent scientific papers have defined the global warming challenge as keeping cumulative global greenhouse emissions between 2000 and 2050 below a trillion tons. Only by staying below that threshold is the world likely to avoid catastrophic increases in global temperatures. When asked, Stern dismissed the differences between the Waxman-Markey targets and what the Europeans want as resulting in “only one or two parts per million” of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. He argued that the key question is what the “major developing countries” like China, India, and Brazil achieve:

There’s a very big difference between whether the major developing countries do a lot and don’t. There you have not one or two parts per million but a big difference. Eighty percent of the growth in emissions going forward for the next several decades is going to come from the developing world.

We are the first to admit, recognize, and talk about our own historic responsibility. The U.S. is the biggest historic emitter of greenhouse emissions. We have a huge responsbility to take leadership, to take action, and to move forward. But, having said that, if you look at the trajectory from now on — hugely weighted toward the developing countries.

The short answer to your question is that I think we can be quite consistent with those sort of scientific goals provided everybody gets in the act.

When asked about the concerns of legislators like Sen. Evan Bayh (D-IN) about the potential for job loss due to a cap on global warming pollution, Stern also said that climate policy offers “a lot of gain” by driving the “transformation to a clean energy economy,” and noted the free allowances given to exporting industries in the Waxman-Markey legislation. He concluded:

It’s a fair question. We don’t want to be at a competitive disadvantage. But the real, most important way in the long run — whether or not it’s immediate or not, but in the slightly longer run — to address these questions is to have an international agreement that has all the parties involved and all the parties taking real action.

China, and other developing countries, do not need to take the same actions that developed countries are taking, but they do need to take significant national actions that they commit to – internationally – that they quantify, and that are ambitious enough to be broadly consistent with the lessons of science. While this choice may be the more difficult one in the immediate term, it is in fact the road to prosperity and success.

In a new memo, CAP’s Andrew Light and Julian Wong explain the impressive gains China has made in building a clean-energy economy, though like Stern they note China is “not there yet.” Stern heads to China on Saturday with “John Holdren, the President’s Science Advisor, David Sandalow, DOE’s lead international official, and others from Treasury and EPA” for a four-day mission.

Todd Stern’s remarks, as prepared for delivery:

Thanks John. It’s a great pleasure to be back at CAP. I’m one of only, say, 3 or 400 people in this town who owe more than they can say to John Podesta – although I probably have a longer and richer pedigree in that department than most. In a nutshell, when it comes to commitment, integrity, toughness and smarts, John writes the book and the rest of us just do our best to keep up. I am honored to be here.

John and the CAP team have been at the forefront of the climate and clean energy debate for years, taking the fight to those who say we can’t, we shouldn’t, we don’t need to, it will cost too much, we should go slow; and promoting a comprehensive vision of a low-carbon future that strengthens the U.S. economy and protects our security and environment. It might seem second nature now to many of us to think of climate change as the spur to a low-carbon transformation of the global economy – a transformation rich with economic opportunity. But it wasn’t always so, and it was CAP that led the way toward this new understanding.

Of course, the need for action could hardly be more evident. With every passing month, the news from the natural front seems to get worse. Broadly speaking, we are seeing a convergence of two problematic sets of numbers – those showing global CO2 concentrations rising substantially faster than even the worst case scenarios of recent models and those indicating that dangerous climate impacts are likely to happen sooner than scientists used to think.

And we are all too familiar with the accumulating evidence of change: Among many other things, Arctic sea ice is disappearing faster than expected. The melting of permafrost in the tundra raises the risk of a huge methane release, with dangerous feedback potential. The Greenland Ice Sheet is steadily shrinking. Sea level now threatens to rise much more than previously anticipated, and water supplies are increasingly at risk with the melting of glaciers in Asia and the Western Hemisphere.

These facts on the ground send a simple and stark message: the status quo is unsustainable. That may seem obvious, but you’d be surprised how often the obvious is resolutely overlooked. It seems to me that anyone who wants to argue about how policy measures — such as the Waxman-Markey bill for example — are in some way too onerous should be required to explain what they would propose instead. Because the unspoken assumption of these critics — that we can carry on as we are — is just not so.

Let me turn now to our diplomatic challenge, which occupies most of my time and attention. Climate change, of course, is a quintessentially global issue that demands a global solution. So while the critical first step must be to put our own house in order with a comprehensive, mandatory national program — which the President and his congressional allies are endeavoring to do — the problem can only be solved globally.

Broadly speaking, we are pursuing our strategy on three related fronts. First, we are fully engaged now in the Framework Convention negotiating process itself. We have a team in Bonn right now for the second of several negotiating sessions this year. You can’t get a global deal done relying only on the Framework Convention process, but you also can’t get there without it. It is an essential part of the whole.

Second, we have established an invigorated dialogue among 16 of the largest economies — including China, India, Brazil, Mexico, South Korea, South Africa and Indonesia – through our Major Economies Forum on Energy and Climate, which will meet in July in Italy immediately after the G8 meeting. We have now had two preparatory sessions — one in Washington, and one, last week, in Paris — and a third will take place later this month in Mexico City. I have long been persuaded — and wrote about it back in my CAP Fellow days — that it is crucial to have a small forum of the major economies that can meet on a more intimate basis and at a higher level than is possible in the Framework Convention negotiating sessions. These meetings can’t pull a rabbit out of a hat, but they do allow for an important, candid dialogue.

Third, we are focusing on key bilateral relationships, and none is more important than China. China may not be the alpha and omega of the international negotiations, but it is close. Certainly no deal will be possible if we don’t find a way forward with China. And here, as in so many aspects of climate change, we are faced with both great challenge and great opportunity.

This year marks the 30th anniversary of normalization of US-China relations, and since President Carter and Vice Premier Deng Xiaoping signed that historic document, China has undergone an astonishing, world-changing transformation.

Over the past 30 years the Chinese economy has grown at 10% per year, raising per capita income from $400 to $5000, lifting 600 million people out of poverty.

Beijing and Shanghai now have per capita incomes topping $10,000, which rivals or exceeds that in many Eastern European countries.

China is now the world’s 2nd largest economy and 2nd largest trading power after the United States.

China has also become America’s largest foreign creditor, with $2 trillion in foreign exchange reserves.

This burst of economic activity has been driven by the largest domestic migration in human history. Every year, 15 to 20 million rural residents move to the city in search of a better way of life. Housing these people has made China the locus of fully half of global construction, with China building two Bostons worth of housing — every month.

Urbanization also creates massive employment needs and a strong commitment among Chinese leadership to maintain economic growth. Yet in recent years, Chinese growth has become less sustainable, both environmentally and economically, and Beijing’s ability to meet its long-term development goals pursing a business-as-usual strategy is now very much in doubt.

And all this economic growth of course has had far-reaching consequences for China’s greenhouse gas emissions. In 1992, when China signed the Framework Convention on Climate Change, China emitted 2.5 Gt of CO2, half of the U.S. total. Today, China emits over 7 Gt of CO2 per year, surpassing the US as the world’s largest emitter.

Moreover, China is rocketing up the emissions curve, while the United States is flattening out. Based on recent trends, the IEA predicts Chinese CO2 emissions will reach 12 Gt by 2030, a 60% upward revision from their estimates just a few years ago.

These numbers are so large that they will profoundly affect the ability of the world even to come close to holding the global concentration of greenhouse gases to a level most climate scientists advise. Consider: according to recent modeling done for Project Catalyst, even if every other country in the world besides China reduced its emissions by 80% between now and 2050 — a thoroughly unrealistic assumption by the way — China’s emissions under business-as-usual assumptions would alone be so large as to put us on a track to global concentrations of 540 ppm of CO2, and a 2.7 degree centigrade temperature increase — far above what scientists consider safe.

And this energy-intensive, coal-driven growth has had toxic consequences for China’s environment and public health. Sixteen of the world’s 20 most polluted cities are in China, particulate pollution in Beijing is six times higher than in New York, and premature deaths from respiratory disease are estimated in a joint World Bank/China research project at 750,000 per year. Water pollution is just as bad — 90 percent of the aquifers in China’s cities are polluted, and more than 75 percent of river water in urban areas is unsuitable for drinking or fishing. Moreover, on any given day, 25 percent of the particulate pollution in Los Angeles is made in China, as is the acid rain problem in Japan and Korea. Pan Yue, a former Vice Minister of the Ministry of Environmental Protection, famously said a few years ago – “The economic miracle will end soon because the environment can no longer keep pace.”

Chinese leadership has increasingly come to recognize the importance of changing course, for many reasons – climate change, energy security and the pressing need to clean up its environment, but also because of the country’s daunting employment needs. With U.S. consumers tightening their belts and Chinese exports declining, Beijing needs a new engine of job creation. And the industries responsible for most of China’s emissions growth don’t create many jobs. The five most energy-intensive industries in the country account for nearly half of China’s CO2 emissions, but employ only 14 million people combined. That’s less than they did a decade ago and a drop in the bucket in a labor pool of 770 million.

And so China has taken significant steps to rebalance its economy towards labor-intensive services and manufacturing, improve its energy efficiency and reduce its emissions. For example, China’s current five-year plan includes the goal of reducing the energy intensity of the economy 20% by 2010, and the aim of increasing the share of renewable energy in the primary energy supply to 15% by 2020. China has implemented increasingly stringent auto emissions standards, stronger than our own, and its domestic stimulus package contained substantial clean energy investments. And there are many other initiatives underway, including an intensive focus on producing electric vehicles, and a new commitment to develop solar power. Already, China is one of the world’s leading producers of both wind and solar technology.

Thus, the impression that China refuses to take action is both inaccurate and unfair. Yet China can and will need to do much more if we are to have any hope of containing climate change.

In essence, China faces a choice. It can stick to its time-honored talking points and cite provisions of the Framework Convention, Kyoto Protocol, or Bali Roadmap to support the proposition that, as a developing country, it isn’t required to commit to significant measures to bring down its greenhouse gas emissions. This approach, indeed, is at least partly reflected in the Submission China sent in to the Secretariat of the Framework Convention in late April. Alternatively, China can take a new path, recognizing the need to make significant international commitments, against the backdrop of a robust, productive collaboration with the United States, among others.

While I think the right choice is clear, we shouldn’t underestimate the dilemma for China. Though China now, in effect, straddles the developed/developing country divide – a developed country in its big cities, a much poorer, developing country in the far-flung countryside – it has always been and seen itself as a developing country. The developed/developing country separation is deeply woven into the fabric of climate change diplomacy. The Montreal Protocol (on ozone depleting substances), by contrast, provided that developing countries would assume the same kind of obligations as developed countries, with just a 10-year delay. But the working assumption of even the advanced developing countries in the world of climate change is that they should enjoy at least a decades-long exemption from the kinds of obligations accepted by developed countries.

In addition, many in China fear that limits on emissions would constrain economic growth, job creation and the country’s capacity to continue its impressive rise.

And yet the choice of clinging to the old principle of assuming no obligations is not sustainable.

It is not sustainable environmentally because China and the other major developing countries are on a track to produce more than 80% of the growth in emissions during the next several decades. If they don’t develop genuine low-carbon pathways for growth, the climate change problem will spin out of control.

It is not sustainable economically because the economic race in the years and decades ahead will be won by those who have reacted nimbly to the imperatives of the low-carbon transition. Those who seek to hold back the tides will lose out: as the evidence of climate change grows increasingly dire, high-carbon goods and services will, before too many passing years, become untenable, replaced by the low-carbon alternatives of a new era.

It is not sustainable politically because developed countries who do agree to take strong action won’t long accept a world in which economic competitors are allowed to free-ride with respect to CO2 emissions.

China, and other developing countries, do not need to take the same actions that developed countries are taking, but they do need to take significant national actions that they commit to – internationally – that they quantify, and that are ambitious enough to be broadly consistent with the lessons of science.

While this choice may be the more difficult one in the immediate term, it is in fact the road to prosperity and success. China has abundant opportunities in the short term to reduce energy demand through improving efficiency and rebalancing its economy. Right now, China emits about 4 times as much CO2 as the United States and 6 times as much as Japan or the EU for every unit of GDP. Partly this reflects an economy much more heavily weighted to energy intensive manufacturing than services, partly it reflects inefficiency, partly an over-dependence on coal.

What China can do – and many in Chinese leadership clearly recognize this – is not to stop growing, but to grow smarter. The only way China will meet its development needs in the long run is to a) rebalance its economy away from polluting industry towards job-creating services, b) increase the efficiency with which industry and buildings consume energy and c) find alternatives to coal or ways to use it cleanly. In short, it is not a tradeoff between economic growth and environmental protection. China must do both.

What the United States must be willing to do, for its own sake as well as China’s, is to meet China halfway and develop a genuine, collaborative partnership on climate change and clean energy.

If the two goliaths on the world stage can join hands and commit each other – at the highest levels – to a long-term, vigorous climate and energy partnership, it will truly change the world.

So we need to press forward with our own efforts to enact a broad-based, mandatory program to drive the clean-energy transition and limit our emissions. And that includes promptly enacting strong legislation to cap carbon pollution.

We need to listen and not just lecture.

We need to make clear that we support China’s growth and development and have no desire to constrain it through climate change commitments or in any other way.

We need to acknowledge the impressive steps the Chinese have already taken to promote low-carbon development and the new ones that will be coming off drawing boards soon.

We need to set our minds to joining with China in an active, real partnership, on the principle of mutual benefit.

And we need to recognize that if we aren’t careful, we may spend the next few years pushing China to do more, but will then spend all the years after that chasing them, as they hurtle profitably down the road to the low-carbon transformation.

On Saturday I will be leaving for China with John Holdren, the President’s Science Advisor, David Sandalow, DOE’s lead international official, and others from Treasury and EPA. We aim to get just this kind of partnership started. It’s the kind of partnership Secretary Clinton discussed with the Chinese during her trip in February, on which I joined her. It is a partnership that can form the basis of a global transition to clean energy. And it is a partnership that can become a constructive, positive anchor in our long-term bilateral relationship with China.

There is much work to be done. China has an important choice to make. And so, in different ways, do we.

Thank you very much.

I and two colleagues at the Center for American Progress put up a column yesterday about how the Waxman-Markey American Clean Energy and Security Act “would achieve more carbon reduction than first meets the eye,” strengthening the chances of a rapprochement with China and Europe in international climate negotiations. Our column was cited the same day in a story in the New York Times by Mike Wines — who never contacted us — on Pelosi’s visit to China:

American officials have already rejected the Chinese proposal as unattainable. The Center for American Progress, a Democratic-leaning research organization, said in a report published Wednesday that the House legislation was unlikely to win enough Chinese support for the two nations to present a united front at the Copenhagen talks in December.

The point of our column is in fact the opposite. Wines’ article at best takes out of context one of the premises of our arguments and at worst seriously distorts the thesis of our piece. What we argue is that there is a way the US and China can come together at Copenhagen, even with the differing expectations on midterm targets, and that the current House legislation could be sufficient to get us there.

What we call for is, first, counting the complementary efficiency, intensity, and other allied programs, in addition to the actual midterm cap goals in Waxman-Markey, to show the legislation could potentially get us closer to what China and Europe wants from us than at first it may appear.

We use, among other things, recent World Resources Institute data on the bill to demonstrate this. Next we argue that one could use a similar approach (which we call “carbon cap equivalents”) to demonstrate that China is making progress on emissions cuts and further counter the argument that Waxman-Markey should not be adopted because “China won’t do anything.”

Of course, at present there is a gap between China and the US on midterm expectations — they want 40 percent cuts below 1990 levels from us by 2020 as opposed to Waxman-Markey’s 17 percent cuts below 2005 levels by 2020 — but use this only as a premise to set up our argument about a better accounting of what Waxman-Markey could actually get us. We even state explicitly that the gap between Chinese expectations and the Waxman-Markey bill is no reason to believe we are at an impasse for an agreement at Copenhagen.

In short one would be hard pressed to give a more distorted representation of our piece. If the paragraph is supposed to suggest that there is a rift between us and Pelosi on this issue it simply isn’t the case. No one would deny that the numbers are different between Waxman-Markey and what the Chinese now claim that they want. The point is that we’re with the supporters of the bill in seeing a way forward to an agreement with it.

Su Wei, China’s chief climate change negotiator.

This week the Obama administration convened a meeting of 17 of the world’s major economies in a forum on global warming outside of the ongoing U.N. climate change process. Though the history of this Major Economies Forum is somewhat tainted, it may well provide a useful opportunity to engage China on global warming, on its way to surpass the United States as the world’s number one carbon emitter. Recent statements by top Chinese officials evince a new openness to adopting targets to reduce the rate of growth in carbon emissions:

Su Wei, a leading figure in China’s climate change negotiating team, said that officials were considering introducing a national target that would limit emissions relative to economic growth in the country’s next five-year plan from 2011.

While that is a small step, it’s a significant one. China and the five other major emitters among developing nations — India, Indonesia, Brazil, South Africa, and Mexico — were not required to accept mandatory carbon emissions caps under the Kyoto Protocol, as they did not put the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere that are causing current increases in global temperatures. The United States alone is responsible for nearly 30 percent of all cumulative global warming pollution. Nonetheless, this exception for developing countries was a key part of the unanimous Senate objection to U.S. ratification of the treaty. The China exception remains at the core of congressional objections to an international agreement on climate change.

Enticing direct negotiation with the major emitting developing nations — especially China — is critical to getting a global climate change agreement inside or outside of the UNFCCC process. There are many indications that China is ready to talk — and even more that China is already taking action.

China is ahead of the United States in terms of its own green stimulus package. It’s a much bemoaned talking point in these discussions that China has far surpassed U.S. capacity in solar cell production since 2005. Chinese leaders are “investing $12.6 million every hour to green their economy.” China is spending twice as much as we are in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act on green jobs and a green recovery despite the relatively larger size of the U.S. economy.

As China’s political climate changes, its physical climate is getting hotter as well. In January 2008, the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification was held in Beijing, a megacity that is already severely swept by dust storms from western and northern regions every year. Shrinking glaciers are starting to cause serious water problems and more intensive damage in the country’s mountainous regions — problems that will soon stress the country’s capacity for short-term mitigation. Just as in the United States, the consequences of climate change are increasingly felt immediately and understood through direct observation rather than being confined to climate modeling.

Joint technological capacity building may be the best road to a new global energy future and help to stimulate the set of climate change agreements which will move us there. Xie Zhenhua, Vice Chairman of the National Development Reform Commission, reiterated that China’s commitment to accepting nationally appropriate reduction goals depends on receiving technology assistance. In Todd Stern’s testimony earlier this month he made it clear that the first priority for the United States in these meetings will be to push along the conversation on technology transfer as a key component of acceptance of emissions caps by the developing major emitters. Such proposals should be discussed now and followed up at the next Major Economies Forum this July in La Maddalena, Italy following the G-8 meeting.

The official Chinese position on climate change remains — you broke it, you fix it. But a creative nudge on the U.S.’s part and a subtle shift in Beijing’s position could open up some real movement in the diplomatic lead up to global climate-change negotiations in Copenhagen.

Read the extended version of this post, “Rise of the Green Dragon?,” at the Center for American Progress.

A new report from the Center for American Progress points out that the United States is slipping behind other nations in the development and deployment of clean energy and efficient infrastructure even as China spends $12.6 million every hour greening their economy.

Read the full study here.

China, as part of their two-year stimulus plan, is poised to spend 3% of their GDP a year on public investments in renewable energy, low-carbon vehicles, high-speed rail, an advanced electric grid, efficiency improvements, and other water-treatment and pollution controls. This is about $12.6 million every hour. In the United States, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act invests about half as much as China on comparable priorities. This represents less than half of one percent of our 2008 gross domestic product.

The paper also shows that, when it comes to preparing our country to compete in the new energy economy of the future and create millions of new jobs, the United States lags behind most of our competitors in the rest of the world in a four key ways.

–We have no national energy portfolio standard that encourages clean, renewable power and shifts away from dirty and dangerous energy.

–We have an outdated electrical grid unsuited for the task of carrying energy from regions rich in wind, solar, and geothermal potential to the people who need the energy.

–We don’t make dirty energy companies pay for the pollution they pump into the air; in fact, we give them billions every year in tax breaks.

–And we don’t invest enough in research, development, and deployment to inspire our entrepreneurs and leverage their discoveries by helping bring their bold new technologies to market.

As venture capitalist John Doerr recently pointed out in his testimony before the Senate Committee on the Environment and Public Works, “What is at stake is whether America will be the worldwide winner in the next great global industry, green technologies.”

On April 13th, China released the National Human Rights Action Plan of China (2009-2010), becoming the 26th country to respond to the call by the United Nations for such a plan. In the 54-page document, first announced last November, the CCP outlined reforms ranging from increased transparency to rural health care. Although China’s first comprehensive human rights plan warrants praise, it should only be welcomed with a critical eye.

The document states “While respecting the universal principles of human rights, the Chinese government, in the light of the basic realities of China, gives priority to the protection of the people’s rights to subsistence and development,” reaffirming the regime’s intention to promote development at the cost of human rights when necessary. In a time when even its neighbor Russia’s President Medvedev rejects the idea of giving up rights in exchange for prosperity, the CCP’s stance is inadequate, and it is important to recognize that the Chinese people cannot enjoy the benefits of economic prosperity without basic rights.

The most notable failures of the plan are in the protection of civil and political rights. While the plan sets to eliminate “illegal detention” by law enforcement, it does not abolish the administrative system of “re-education through labor,” in which civic leaders and political dissidents are often sent to labor camps for up to four years without a trial.

The promise of curbing torture, forced confessions, and arbitrary arrests are also undermined by the conditions in more than 2,700 pre-trial detention centers and an unknown number of unregistered jails. The New York Times and Amnesty International report that since February, at least seven inmates have died under suspicious circumstances while in police custody.

Despite the shortfalls, the publication of the two-year plan is a significant step for a nation with a history of neglecting basic human rights. But it is not enough to simply reaffirm the principles already enshrined in the Chinese Constitution. China must open up for discussions of concrete cases, such as the conviction of Hu Jia, a prominent AIDS activist, and the detention of Liu Xiaobo, one of the authors of Charter 08. In both instances, the men’s “right to be heard” outlined in the Action Plan and the freedom of speech engraved in the Constitution were violated, and the situation must be addressed.

In the shadows of the U.S. State Department’s negative China human rights report in February, the ambitious Action Plan provides a reason for optimism. However, we cannot let the promises of a better future cloud our sight in observing the anniversary of the Tiananmen massacre, nor can we forget about the current reality of neglected and systematically violated human rights. To overcome its stigma, China must couple the reaffirmation of principles with tangible actions.

Almost twenty years after the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) sent tanks into Tiananmen Square, a national Chinese human rights movement has taken shape again in the form of a statement called Charter 08. Released by a small group of Chinese intellectuals, lawyers, and dissidents on the 60th anniversary of the signing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights last December, Charter 08 calls for greater freedoms, guarantees of basic human rights for the Chinese people, and an end to autocratic rule. Over 8,100 Chinese citizens, including students, businesspeople, and former party officials, have now signed the document, bravely adding their names, addresses, and occupations to the electronic petition despite the risk of government persecution. The document continues to circulate online throughout China, where 253 million internet users reside.

Whether the Charter 08 campaign — the longest sustained democracy and human rights campaign since Tiananmen — will catalyze a larger movement in China is unclear, but human rights activists and China watchers continue to track its progress, eager to find out how far the Party will let the effort go. Chinese authorities have already detained Liu Xiaobo, a famous literary critic, dissenter, and one of the authors of the document, and placed other suspected authors under surveillance.

In a way, though, Charter 08 has already made its point. Questioning many assumptions about governance in China and directly challenging the legitimacy of the country’s one-party rule, the statement asserts that “the time is arriving everywhere for citizens to be masters of states. For China, the path that leads out of our current predicament is to divest ourselves of the authoritarian notion of reliance on an ‘enlightened overlord’ or an ‘honest official’ and to turn instead toward a system of liberties, democracy, and the rule of law, and toward fostering the consciousness of modern citizens who see rights as fundamental and participation as a duty.”

What is significant is that the call to determine one’s own destiny comes from and is supported by the Chinese people themselves and contradicts the government’s dual claims that it governs on behalf of the people and that cultural factors preclude it from implementing a “Western-style” democracy. Moreover, Charter 08 undermines the CCP’s appeal to a “democracy with Chinese characteristics” — which is in fact no democracy at all. The Chinese leadership uses the term “democracy” liberally to mean elections on the local levels and more consultation within the party and, at times, even with the people before major decisions. But “democracy with Chinese characteristics” still rules out provincial and national elections, as well as any direct say from the Chinese people over policymaking.

The petition also bears witness to the universality of liberal democracy and human rights. It affirms freedom, human rights, equality, republicanism, democracy, and constitutional rule as “universal values” and calls for a new constitution, separation of powers, legislative democracy, and an independent judiciary. Notably, many of the recommendations for which Charter 08 advocates –- freedom to form groups, freedom to assemble, freedom of expression, and freedom of religion -– are items covered under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, both of which China has signed.

Perhaps most striking about Charter 08, however, is that it makes the practical case for change. The document notes that China’s current course is unsustainable, that “the stultifying results” of authoritarian rule and the government’s refusal to implement a national human rights action plan are “endemic official corruption, an undermining of the rule of law, weak human rights, decay in public ethics, crony capitalism, growing inequality between the wealthy and the poor, pillage of the natural environment as well as of the human and historical environments, and the exacerbation of a long list of social conflicts, especially, in recent times, a sharpening animosity between officials and ordinary people.” Though Charter 08 makes a clear case for democracy and change in governance, neither of which is likely in the near-term, it calls for neither revolution nor subversion, leaving the practical steps to the Chinese people.

On social development, Charter 08 requests many of the items that the government itself has noted as necessary for China’s development: accountable systems of public finance; the establishment of fair and adequate social security systems, including basic access to education, health care, pensions, and employment; protection of the environment; and promotion of free and fair markets. Such items are achievable and would shore up support for the Chinese regime, which is growing increasingly worried about its legitimacy, especially as economic growth, the basis for the CCP’s legitimacy, slows.

Human rights movements indigenous to China, such as Charter 08, should be recognized and supported by the rest of the world. Ultimately of course, change in China must come from the Chinese, but the election of President Obama, who has vowed to end torture, respect human rights, and rehabilitate America’s image in the world, offers the United States a chance to play a constructive role promoting human rights in China.

As an important first step, the United States can use this moment to signal its support for human rights and for democracy in China. Next week, China will undergo its Universal Periodic Review at the UN Human Rights Council. In the near term, the United States should support the process and reaffirm the tenets of the UDHR and the ICCPR, which echo many of the objectives that Charter 08 endeavors to achieve. Further down the line, the United States should seek elected seat on the Council with the aim of utilizing the UNHRC to globalize pressure on China. A number of other multilateral approaches are available to policymakers who wish to improve human rights in China, including addressing labor standards through WTO and ILO agreements. William Schulz’s new report for the Center for American Progress, “Strategic Persistence: How the United States Can Help Improve Human Rights in China,” provides a thorough list of ideas available to policymakers to advance human rights in China.

More specific to Charter 08, the United States can help to protect the authors and signatories of the petition by joining the many voices calling for the release of political prisoners like Liu and keeping a spotlight on China’s arbitrary arrests, particularly as they relate to the petition. Another option is to provide financial and information support to those seeking to breach China’s firewall, which currently blocks access to Charter 08 in China.

The question of whether China will “embrace universal human values, join the mainstream of civilized nations, and build a democratic system” will only be answered with time. But for now, the Charter 08 represents the dissatisfaction with the status quo and the willingness of the Chinese people to stand up to oppression with the tenacity of an ox.

The announcement sent markets around the world soaring as it eased fears of a huge dropoff in Chinese demand.

This emergency spending by the Chinese government will invest “the equivalent of almost a fifth of its gross domestic product last year on infrastructure.” The $568 billion is approximately 18% of China’s $3.3 trillion 2007 GDP.

An equivalent investment by the United States government in infrastructure and emergency spending would cost over $2.4 trillion, or 18% of the United States’ $13.8 trillion 2007 GDP.

This is 15 times the size of Speaker Pelosi’s proposed two-part $160 billion stimulus, and 12 times the size of Center for American Progress’ “Green Recovery” proposal that would invest $200 billion in green infrastructure and alternative energy priorities over two years.

In a column today, Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman points out that much of the failure of FDR’s New Deal stimulus was that it was not large enough.

He writes, “My advice to the Obama people is to figure out how much help they think the economy needs, then add 50 percent. It’s much better, in a depressed economy, to err on the side of too much stimulus than on the side of too little.”

UPDATE II: David Roberts at Gristmill, A Siegel at Energy Smart, and the Sierra Club praise McCain’s recognition of global warming but find his plan inadequate. Joe Romm at Climate Progress responds to McCain’s hypocrisy for delivering the speech at a Danish wind turbine facility. Matthew Yglesias wonders about McCain’s fixation on nuclear and insufficient goals. David Corn wonders why McCain “didn’t blast Bush on global warming when he was courting Republican voters.”

Here is the full text of Sen. John McCain’s (R-AZ) speech on climate change in Portland, Oregon (changes from prepared remarks are indicated):

Thank you all very much. I appreciate the hospitality of Vestas Wind Technology. Today is a kind of test run for the company. They’ve got wind technicians here, wind studies, and all these wind turbines, but there’s no wind. So now I know why they asked me to come give a speech.

Every day, when there are no reporters and cameras around to draw attention to it, this company and others like it are doing important work. And what we see here is just a glimpse of much bigger things to come. Wind power is one of many alternative energy sources that are changing our economy for the better. And one day they will change our economy forever.

Wind is a clean and predictable source of energy, and about as renewable as anything on earth. Along with solar power, fuel-cell technology, cleaner burning fuels and other new energy sources, wind power will bring America closer to energy independence. Our economy depends upon clean and affordable alternatives to fossil fuels, and so, in many ways, does our security. A large share of the world’s oil reserves is controlled by foreign powers that do not have our interests at heart. And as our reliance on oil passes away, their power will vanish with it.

In the coming weeks I intend to address many of the great challenges that America’s energy policies must meet. When we debate energy bills in Washington, it should be more than a competition among industries for special favors, subsidies, and tax breaks. In the Congress, we need to send the special interests on their way – without their favors and subsidies. We need to draw on the best ideas of both parties, and on all the resources a free market can provide. We need to keep our eyes on big goals in energy policy, the serious dangers, and the common interests of the American people.

Today I’d like to focus on just one of those challenges, and among environmental dangers it is surely the most serious of all. Whether we call it “climate change” or “global warming,” in the end we’re all left with the same set of facts. The facts of global warming demand our urgent attention, especially in Washington. Good stewardship, prudence, and simple commonsense demand that we to act meet the challenge, and act quickly.

Some of the most compelling evidence of global warming comes to us from NASA. No longer do we need to rely on guesswork and computer modeling, because satellite images reveal a dramatic disappearance of glaciers, Antarctic ice shelves and polar ice sheets. And I’ve seen some of this evidence up close. A few years ago I traveled to the area of Svalbard, Norway, a group of islands in the Arctic Ocean. I was shown the southernmost point where a glacier had reached twenty years earlier. From there, we had to venture northward up the fjord to see where that same glacier ends today – because all the rest has melted. On a trip to Alaska, I heard about a national park visitor’s center that was built to offer a picture-perfect view of a large glacier. Problem is, the glacier is gone. A work of nature that took ages to form had melted away in a matter of decades.

Our scientists have also seen and measured reduced snowpack, with earlier runoffs in the Pacific Northwest and elsewhere. We have seen sustained drought in the Southwest, and across the world average temperatures that seem to reach new records every few years. We have seen a higher incidence of extreme weather events. In the frozen wilds of Alaska, the Arctic, Antarctic, and elsewhere, wildlife biologists have noted sudden changes in animal migration patterns, a loss of their habitat, a rise in sea levels. And you would think that if the polar bears, walruses, and sea birds have the good sense to respond to new conditions and new dangers, then humanity can respond as well.

We have many advantages in the fight against global warming, but time is not one of them. Instead of idly debating the precise extent of global warming, or the precise timeline of global warming, we need to deal with the central facts of rising temperatures, rising waters, and all the endless troubles that global warming will bring. We stand warned by serious and credible scientists across the world that time is short and the dangers are great. The most relevant question now is whether our own government is equal to the challenge.

There are vital measures we can take in the short term, even as we focus on long-term policies to mitigate the effects of global warming. In the years ahead, we are likely to see reduced water supplies … more forest fires than in previous decades … changes in crop production … more heat waves afflicting our cities and a greater intensity in storms. Each one of these consequences of climate change will require policies to protect our citizens, especially those most vulnerable to violent weather. Each one will require new precautions in the repair and construction our roads, bridges, railways, seawalls and other infrastructure. Some state local governments have already begun their planning and preparation for extreme events and other impacts of climate change. The federal government can help them in many ways, above all by coordinating their efforts, and I am committed to providing that support.

To lead in this effort, however, our government must strike at the source of the problem — with reforms that only Congress can enact and the president can sign. We know that greenhouse gasses are heavily implicated as a cause of climate change. And we know that among all greenhouse gasses, the worst by far is the carbon-dioxide that results from fossil-fuel combustion. Yet for all the good work of entrepreneurs and inventors in finding cleaner and better technologies, the fundamental incentives of the market are still on the side of carbon-based energy. This has to change before we can make the decisive shift away from fossil fuels.

For the market to do more, government must do more by opening new paths of invention and ingenuity. And we must do this in a way that gives American businesses new incentives and new rewards to seek, instead of just giving them new taxes to pay and new orders to follow. The most direct way to achieve this is through a system that sets clear limits on all greenhouse gases, while also allowing the sale of rights to excess emissions. And this is the proposal I will submit to the Congress if I am elected president — a cap-and-trade system to change the dynamic of our energy economy.

As a program under the Clean Air Act, the cap-and-trade system achieved enormous success in ridding the air of acid rain. And the same approach that brought a decline in sulfur dioxide emissions can have an equally dramatic and permanent effect on carbon emissions. Instantly, automakers, coal companies, power plants, and every other enterprise in America would have an incentive to reduce carbon emissions, because when they go under those limits they can sell the balance of permitted emissions for cash. As never before, the market would reward any person or company that seeks to invent, improve, or acquire alternatives to carbon-based energy. It is very hard to picture venture capitalists, corporate planners, small businesses and environmentalists all working to the same good purpose. But such cooperation is actually possible in the case of climate change, and this reform will set it in motion.

The people of this country have a genius for adapting, solving problems, and inventing new and better ways to accomplish our goals. But the federal government can’t just summon those talents by command – only the free market can draw them out. A cap-and-trade policy will send a signal that will be heard and welcomed all across the American economy. Those who want clean coal technology, more wind and solar, nuclear power, biomass and bio-fuels will have their opportunity through a new market that rewards those and other innovations in clean energy. The market will evolve, too, by requiring sensible reductions in greenhouse gases, but also by allowing full flexibility in how industry meets that requirement. Entrepreneurs and firms will know which energy investments they should make. And the highest rewards will go to those who make the smartest, safest, most responsible choices. A cap-and-trade reform will also create a profitable opportunity for rural America to receive market-based payments — instead of government subsidies — for the conservation practices that store carbon in the soils of our nation’s farms.

We will cap emissions according to specific goals, measuring progress by reference to past carbon emissions. By the year 2012, we will seek a return to 2005 levels of emission … by 2020, a return to 1990 levels … and so on until we have achieved at least a reduction of sixty percent below 1990 levels by the year 2050. In the course of time, it may be that new ideas and technologies will come along that we can hardly imagine today, allowing all industries to change with a speed that will surprise us. More likely, however, there will be some companies that need extra emissions rights, and they will be able to buy them. The system to meet these targets and timetables will give these companies extra time to adapt — and that is good economic policy. It is also a matter of simple fairness, because the cap-and-trade system will create jobs, improve livelihoods, and strengthen futures across our country.

The goal in all of this is to assure an energy supply that is safe, secure, diverse, and domestic. And in pursuit of these objectives, we cannot afford to take economic growth and job creation for granted. A strong and growing economy is essential to all of our goals, and especially the goal of finding alternatives to carbon-based technology. We want to turn the American economy toward cleaner and safer energy sources. And you can’t achieve that by imposing costs that the American economy cannot sustain.

As part of my cap-and-trade incentives, I will also propose to include the purchase of offsets from those outside the scope of the trading system. This will broaden the array of rewards for reduced emissions, while also lowering the costs of compliance with our new emissions standards. Through the sale of offsets – and with strict standards to assure that reductions are real – our agricultural sector alone can provide as much as forty percent of the overall reductions we will require in greenhouse gas emissions. And in the short term, farmers and ranchers can do it in some of the most cost-effective ways.

Over time, an increasing fraction of permits for emissions could be supplied by auction, yielding federal revenues that can be put to good use. Under my plan, we will apply these and other federal funds to help build the infrastructure of a post-carbon economy. We will support projects to advance technologies that capture and store carbon emissions. We will assist in transmitting wind- and solar-generated power from states that have them to states that need them. We will add to current federal efforts to develop promising technologies, such as plug-ins, hybrids, flex-fuel vehicles, and hydrogen-powered cars and trucks. We will also establish clear standards in government-funded research, to make sure that funding is effective and focused on the right goals.

And to create greater demand for the best technologies and practices in energy conservation, we will use the purchasing power of the United States government. Our government can hardly expect citizens and private businesses to adopt or invest in low-carbon technologies when it doesn’t always hold itself to the same standard. We need to set a better example in Washington, by consistently applying the best environmental standards to every purchase our government makes.

As we move toward all of these goals, and over time put the age of fossil fuels behind us, we must consider every alternative source of power, and that includes nuclear power. When our cap-and-trade policy is in place, there will be a sudden and sustained pursuit in the market for new investment opportunities in low-emission fuel sources. And here we have a known, proven energy source that requires exactly zero emissions. We have 104 nuclear reactors in our country, generating about twenty percent of our electricity. These reactors alone spare the atmosphere from about 700 million metric tons of carbon dioxide that would otherwise be released every year. That’s the annual equivalent of nearly all emissions from all the cars we drive in America. Europe, for its part, has 197 reactors in operation, and nations including France and Belgium derive more than half their electricity from nuclear power. Those good practices contribute to the more than two billion metric tons of carbon dioxide avoided every year, worldwide, because of nuclear energy. It doesn’t take a leap in logic to conclude that if we want to arrest global warming, then nuclear energy is a powerful ally in that cause.

In a cap-and-trade energy economy, the cost of building new reactors will be less prohibitive. The incentives to invest in a mature, zero-emissions technology will be stronger. New research and innovation will help the industry to overcome the well known drawbacks to nuclear power, such as the transport and storage of waste. And our government can help in these efforts. We can support research to extend the use of existing plants. Above all, we must make certain that every plant in America is safe from the designs of terrorists. And when all of this is assured, it will be time again to expand our use of one of the cleanest, safest, and most reliable sources of energy on earth.

For all of the last century, the profit motive basically led in one direction — toward machines, methods, and industries that used oil and gas. Enormous good came from that industrial growth, and we are all the beneficiaries of the national prosperity it built. But there were costs we weren’t counting, and often hardly noticed. And these terrible costs have added up now, in the atmosphere, in the oceans, and all across the natural world. They are no longer tenable, sustainable, or defensible. And what better way to correct past errors than to turn the creative energies of the free market in the other direction? Under the cap-and-trade system, this can happen. In all its power, the profit motive will suddenly begin to shift and point the other way – toward cleaner fuels, wiser ways, and a healthier planet.

As a nation, we make our own environmental plans and our own resolutions. But working with other nations to arrest climate change can be an even tougher proposition. China, India, and other developing economic powers in particular are among the greatest contributors to global warming today — increasing carbon emissions at a furious pace – and they are not receptive to international standards. Nor do they think that we in the industrialized world are in any position to preach the good news of carbon-emission control. We made most of our contributions to global warming before anyone knew about global warming.

This set of facts and perceived self-interests proved the undoing of the Kyoto Protocols. As president, I will have to deal with the same set of facts. I will not shirk the mantle of leadership that the United States bears. I will not permit eight long years to pass without serious action on serious challenges. I will not accept the same dead-end of failed diplomacy that claimed Kyoto. The United States will lead and will lead with a different approach — an approach that speaks to the interests and obligations of every nation.

Shared dangers mean shared duties, and global problems require global cooperation. The United States and our friends in Europe cannot alone deal with the threat of global warming. No nation should be exempted from its obligations. And least of all should we make exceptions for the very countries that are accelerating carbon emissions while the rest of us seek to reduce emissions. If we are going to establish meaningful environmental protocols, then they must include the two nations that have the potential to pollute the air faster, and in greater annual volume, than any nation ever in history.

At the same time, we will continue in good faith to negotiate with China and other nations to enact the standards and controls that are in the interest of every nation – whatever their stage of economic development. And America can take the lead in offering these developing nations the low-carbon technologies that we will make and they will need. One good idea or invention to reduce carbon emissions is worth a thousand finely crafted proposals at a conference table. And the governments of these developing economic powers will soon recognize, as America is beginning to do, their urgent need for cleaner-burning fuels and safer sources of energy.

If the efforts to negotiate an international solution that includes China and India do not succeed, we still have an obligation to act.

In my approach to global climate-control efforts, we will apply the principle of equal treatment. We will apply the same environmental standards to industries in China, India, and elsewhere that we apply to our own industries. And if industrializing countries seek an economic advantage by evading those standards, I would work with the European Union and other like-minded governments that plan to address the global warming problem to develop a cost equalization mechanism to apply develop effective diplomacy, effect a transfer of technology, or other means to engage those countries that decline to enact a similar cap.

For all of its historical disregard of environmental standards, it cannot have escaped the attention of the Chinese regime that China’s skies are dangerously polluted, its beautiful rivers are dying, its grasslands vanishing, its coastlines receding, and its own glaciers melting. We know many of these signs from our own experience — from environmental lessons learned the hard way. And today, all the world knows that they are the signs of even greater trouble to come. Pressing on blindly with uncontrolled carbon emissions is in no one’s interest, especially China’s. And the rest of the world stands ready to help.

Like other environmental challenges — only more so — global warming presents a test of foresight, of political courage, and of the unselfish concern that one generation owes to the next. We need to think straight about the dangers ahead, and to meet the problem with all the resources of human ingenuity at our disposal. We Americans like to say that there is no problem we can’t solve, however complicated, and no obstacle we cannot overcome if we meet it together. I believe this about our country. I know this about our country. And now it is time for us to show those qualities once again.

Thank you.

Tibetans are all peaceloving Buddhist monks and the Chinese government instantly quashes all organized dissent. Even though the events of the past two weeks do not fit neatly into these mental slots, Beijing will not be able to convince the western world otherwise unless it changes its Tibet policy quickly and dramatically.

According to the LA Times, Tibetans randomly and savagely beat and killed Chinese “solely on the basis of their ethnicity.” Gangs of Tibetans burned and destroyed Han and Muslim owned shops. The Chinese authorities held back at first — making the situation much worse — and then they used lethal force to stop the violence, firing live ammunition into crowds of people and beating suspects, by some accounts. Eventually, China sent in enough police and equipment to take on Russia.

The resentment that triggered the riots is Beijing¹s doing, and Beijing ultimately has to account for it. Tibetans do not enjoy the automomy they were once promised. Their religious practice is highly compromised, they fear for the survival of their culture, and they are excluded from any positions of real power in their own society. (In a sad irony, the high profile of the Tibet cause in Hollywood and Western Europe, argues Patrick French, may well have worsened the plight of Tibetans, offering symbolic gestures that have made China dig-in but haven’t actually done anything to improve life for Tibetans)

Time is not on Beijing’s side. The Dali Lama condemns violence and does not advocate independence for Tibet. Many Tibetans of the next generation are not so restrained on either score, having grown up on a diet of cultural repression‹some exile groups openly advocate terrorism. Moreover, the basic bargain that has worked in most of China to keep the Communist Party in power — we improve your standard of living and you agree to shut up about us — has not worked and will not work in Tibet.

Beijing’s only choice right now — to ensure the Beijing Olympics are not forever tarnished and to convince the world that it should welcome China’s ascent as a great and responsible power ­is to negotiate sincerely, respectfully and flexibly with the Dali Lama toward true and final autonomy for Tibet. China has a chance to pull an astonishing policy and PR coop — to take a decades old albatross of its neck and have the world leave Beijing not only impressed with the fantastic economic progress of China, but also with the wisdom of the Chinese government. Too bad they probably wont grasp it.