U.S. Relations with the People's Republic of China (2006)

U.S. Department of State

Interview With Peter Hartcher of the Sydney Morning Herald

Secretary Condoleezza Rice
Hanoi, Vietnam
November 19, 2006

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QUESTION: Jumping to climate change, there's a lot in sort of in foment at the moment on climate change policy. Would the U.S. or this Administration ever agree to any international deal that had a proscriptive approach to emissions, that had some, you know, Kyoto-style binding limit?

SECRETARY RICE: Well, let's recognize that the Kyoto limits haven't worked that well. I think people really ought to go back and do an audit of how well countries that signed up to Kyoto did. I think it'll be a surprising story.

QUESTION: That many countries aren't going to hit their targets.

SECRETARY RICE: Yeah, they're not going to make their targets. And what the United States did was to say that we weren't going to sign on to targets that we knew we wouldn't meet and an approach that we thought would cripple the American economy. And I think that was the honest way to deal with this.

But it doesn't mean that the United States hasn't been very active on issues of greenhouse gas emissions and climate change. The United States spends $5.8 billion a year on the science of climate change and on incentives for corporations and others to, through R&D, to improve the capability to go to clean sources of energy. We've been pioneering in clean coal technology. We've been -- the President has been very active, back to a State of the Union Address a couple of years ago on hydrogen fuel cells. We are interested obviously in bio-diesel. But the -- and the President has put back on the agenda nuclear energy, which of course for a variety of reasons had dropped off the agenda but does provide the potential for significant energy supply that is clean.

Now, in terms of international activity, we have a very good partnership, the Asia Pacific Partnership Six, of which Australia is a member, which is trying to unite economic growth, energy resources and environmental stewardship, which I think those three have to go together. And they have to go together for economies like our own, but they especially have to go together if you intend to enlist large developing economies like China and India, which, if they are left out of any international approaches, those approaches are of course going to be wholly ineffective. So the fact that China and India were left out of Kyoto was another problem.

India and China are parts of the Asia Pacific Partnership Six and very much like this approach, but I think that there is more that we can do. I know that Australia is very interested in this issue and perhaps promoting it as a part of the APEC next year, that's something that we're very interested in. But ultimately, economies have to grow, the environment has to be clean and we have to have sufficient energy, and we've got to put those three together into an active policy.

I'd just note finally that if you look at energy intensivity in economies, ours has actually been pretty good. In terms of how much unit of GDP1 gets for how much energy we expend, the United States has been going in the right direction. And it is in part the decisions of scores and scores of individual companies that are making good stewardship decisions about energy resources.

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QUESTION: Taxing imports from countries that don't take what the French deem suitable action on climate change and ending what he called environmental dumping.

SECRETARY RICE: Well, I just don't think that would be a particularly useful or acceptable proposal in a world economy that is highly dependent on the economic growth of the United States and increasingly on economic growth from China.

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2006/T25-6