US and China must fight emissions together
By John Kerry
A century before Nixon’s visit, the Chinese leapfrogged technologies and bypassed the telegram – which was impractical for the Chinese system of writing – to embrace a new US invention: the telephone. Today we need China to forgo the carbon-intensive industrial processes that fuelled the west in the 19th and 20th centuries and to pioneer the clean technologies of the 21st. Sceptics are right that if China does not reciprocate, our domestic efforts will be for naught. But surely, with our climate at stake, America and China’s differences demand broader and deeper climate co-operation, not less.
The writer is chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee |