Wen Jiabao on Climate Change
Wen Jiabao issued a statement on climate change during his trip in Europe. We’ve pulled key points from the Xinhua article:
- Green Stimulus. “We are of the view that to develop a green economy is probably another area in the economy as we meet the international financial crisis,” Wen said.
- Wen Heads National Leadership Group on Climate. The Chinese premier said China has established a national leadership group to tackle climate change and “I’m head of the group.”
- China’s Energy Efficiency Targets. In the 11th five-year plan, China has set targets to annually reduce the per unit GDP energy consumption by 4 percent and in total by 20 percent in five years.
- Caps Difficult. It’s difficult for China to take quantified emission reduction quotas at the summit, because the country is still at an early stage of development, Wen said, Europe started its industrialization several hundred years ago, but for China, it has only been dozens of years.
- China’s Per Capita Emissions Low. “China has a 1.3 billion population, and in terms of per capita greenhouse gas emission, we are certainly not the biggest one, yet we are still very active and positive about our cooperation with Europe in terms of saving energy, reducing pollution, developing a low carbon economy and developing those environmentally friendly technologies,” Wen said.
We believe it’s critical for the US and China – the world’s two largest emitters – to work together and to move quickly to break through some of the impasses to date. New Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will be going to China soon and climate and energy will be high on the agenda, as the New York Times reports. We’ll be putting out some of our recommendations for how this can be done soon.
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[...] plans on allocating some of its $585 billion (about 4 trillion yuan) stimulus to fund “green economy” projects that will improve energy efficiency and, ultimately, stem climate change. (Check [...]