Book Talk | Cooperating for the Climate with Joanna Lewis

Speaker Highlights 

Joanna Lewis

 “When there is the absence of a high-level political signal that climate change is important for the US and China to work on, for example, it stalls things at the working level even if there’s much less of a political sensitivity at that level.” 

“It's important to note that when I started researching these bilateral partnerships, a lot of these were unilateral where you had technology know-how flowing into China, but this has really shifted. This is very important to acknowledge, that you can’t design partnerships in the same way you did 20 years ago, because China is leading in many of these technologies now.” 

“Economic and security concerns should not be a reason to not engage at all, we just have to engage in a way that reflects the new world we live in and takes into account how to manage these risks.”

Erica Thomas

The bilateral agreement on Science and Technology was the first official agreement signed after normalization of relations between the US and China in 1979. Over the following 30 years since that agreement, cooperation branched into hundreds of agreements between 25 technical agencies on the US side and their counterparts on the Chinese side.  

Energy and climate cooperation have long been really compartmentalized. In recent years, strains in the political and economic strains in the relationship can have direct implications for the success of any climate and energy cooperative effort, and now we see climate and energy cooperation can no longer be compartmentalized like it used to be. 

Shuang Liu

Instead of North to South, South to South collaboration in clean energy manufacture capacity is growing ... Chinese renewable energy companies have been building their manufacturing capacity abroad in South East Asia.

China can offer relative cheap and good quality technologies to Global South countries. Increasing requirements for local content in these host countries is a pull factor for Chinese to build clean energy manufacturing.

Some of the legal challenges faced by carbon markets -- like between US and China -- is how to learn from each other and how to have a more sound an legal based carbon market... some of the potential collaborations can be built up on experiences, good beliefs, and practices.