Buried in the text of Tuesday’s joint declaration between the President Obama and Chinese President Hu Jintao was a significant climate announcement: The Obama administration will offer concrete emission reduction targets as part of next month’s negotiations, as long as the Chinese offer a climate proposal of their own.
The question of whether the United States would identify a short-term emission goal has been one of the main sticking points in the United Nations-sponsored talks for nearly a year. Almost all industrialized nations, and many major developing countries, have announced how much they plan to curb their greenhouse gas output by 2020. Neither the United States nor China — which is not obligated to do so under the U.N. framework, even though it now ranks as the world’s biggest carbon emitter — has done so, thereby hampering the prospects of an agreement.
