Plan announced for China and U.S. to solve climate crisis together

The Pew Center on Global Climate Change and the Asia Society released a joint report today calling for U.S. and Chinese leaders to launch a bilateral initiative to tackle the issues of energy security and climate change. The report, “A Roadmap for U.S.-China Cooperation on Energy and Climate Change,” outlines a plan for the two countries to work together to tackle this important issue.

John Thornton, chairman of the Brookings Institution, stated, “What I like about this particular report, I love the world roadmap. This is a roadmap of what we need to do and how we need to get there.”

The U.S. and China currently have the most carbon emissions per year, while the U.S. per capita emission is higher. China is developing rapidly, and it is projected that in 20 years the Chinese average per capita income will be equal to that in the U.S. Thornton expressed concerns, “If the Chinese consumer or citizen continues down this, what I’ll call ‘Western model’… it would mean that China would consume something on the order of 100 million barrels of oil a day. As most of you know, today we don’t produce 100 million barrels of oil a day in the world. He continued, “It dawned on me that the world simply cannot support 1.3 billion incremental people living the way you live.” For this reason, the roadmap focuses on the need for immediate action and innovation coming from government and businesses in both countries.

Thornton concluded, “It can’t happen fast enough and it needs the engagement of everybody in this room plus your ten closest friends. Because this is too important, we simply cannot let this go down the list of priorities; notwithstanding the fact that the United States currently has a whole bunch of crisis priorities, we can’t let it slip down because this is truly existential.”