Secretary Clinton all but endorsed the report last week by making a major address on Climate Change at the Asia Society [transcript and video] in which she advocated for some of the high level proposals and announced that US Special Envoy for Climate Change, Tod Stern would accompany her on her first international trip, including to China.

The report proclaimed that, without the US and China, ‘it will not be possible to find a meaningful remedy’ to the climate change problem. That these two countries ‘must be partners in any effort to avert catastrophic climate change and usher in a new and prosperous low-carbon global economy’.

This represents important progress from both sides.

Further common ground was found on the principle of ‘common but differentiated responsibilities’. Already a key principle of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) ‘common but differentiated responsibilities’ is the starting point for China’s National Climate Change Program. The Roadmap acknowledges that the US is ‘the world’s largest economy and largest historic greenhouse gas emitter’. This idea is embedded throughout the document, which even provides historical data:

the United States is by far the largest contributor to the greenhouse gases now burdening the atmosphere, responsible for 29 per cent of energy-related CO2 emissions since 1850. China accounts for only about eight percent of these historic emissions. But as its economy has boomed, its emissions have soared, and it recently surpassed the United States as the world’s largest annual emitter.

For top level US and Chinese Climate Change brass to accept these words leaves the door open for agreement in Copenhagen.

The Roadmap acknowledges key differences between the US and China in ‘their stages of development, economic structures, political systems, resource endowments, emission drivers, and opportunities for emission reduction’. China’s population is more than four times the size of the United States’ and its per capita emissions are 78 per cent lower (although China’s per capita emissions are growing at a rate four to six times as fast as those of the United States). Despite China’s rapid economic ascendancy, it remains a developing country (albeit a strong, emerging economy), with a per capita income 30 per cent lower than the world average, and an enormous rural population living on far less.

The Roadmap also acknowledges that while some of China’s GHG intensive products are exported, the vast majority are consumed domestically.

This language could be a foundation upon which an official agreement might be predicated. It fuses the language of both sides into a sensible whole from which progress can be made.

The objective of the report is clear: to direct senior leaders in the US and China to develop a sustained, focused partnership aimed at dealing with the most urgent important aspects of climate change.

However, for all the diplomatic progress that the Roadmap represents, it neglects the central aspect of any long term solution to climate change: global atmospheric GHG concentration targets, and the national emission trajectories required to achieve those targets.

Much of the report focuses on areas of priority for collaboration, ordered according to two measures: those that

1. have the greatest potential for reducing emissions and strengthening energy security;
2. would benefit most from direct collaboration.

These criteria lead to the nomination of five priority areas for high return government investments:

1. deploying low emissions coal technologies,
2. improving energy efficiency and conservation,
3. developing an advanced electric grid,
4. promoting renewable energy, and
5. quantifying emissions and financing low-carbon technologies.

The roadmap argues that ‘the United States and China should not await new domestic legislation or multilateral agreements before launching stronger collaborative efforts’. But preventing catastrophic climate change means stabilizing the global concentration of GHGs in the atmosphere. Achieving that requires at least two points of agreement among the 15 (at minimum) major GHG emitting countries:

1. What global atmospheric concentration of GHGs is acceptable?
2. What will be each country’s fair GHG emissions trajectory to reach that target?

The US-China Roadmap is a welcome and authoritative development. There needs to be much more intensive work at international consensus-building if there is any likelihood of achieving Garnaut’s slim chance. And Australia needs to be playing an active role in that, including with China.

The full report can be found here [.pdf].