E3G

Living on Earth: Climate Diplomacy

By Jennifer Morgan

With climate negotiations in Bali fast approaching, and a conference of Major Emitters scheduled for next week in Washington D.C., E3G’s Jennifer Morgan provided an international perspective for National Public Radio’s Living on Earth program.

A copy of the transcript follows below. You can listen online from the Living on Earth website.

Climate Diplomacy

CURWOOD: Now for an international perspective we turn to Jennifer Morgan, who is an advisor to the German government and director of the Climate Change Program for the British advocacy group E3G.

The United States and China are the largest emitters of global warming gasses so a lot of the upcoming negotiations are focused on those two countries—the U.S., which repudiated Kyoto, and China, which has ratified Kyoto but is not bound under it to cap emissions. I asked Jennifer Morgan to explain the position of China, and its president, Hu Jintao.

MORGAN: My understanding of the Chinese position is that they very much recognize their responsibility in causing climate change and are ready to act to curb their emissions but that they don’t think that they should have to take on the same type of commitment as developed countries should. They are still working through raising people out of poverty, etcetera. And their per capita emissions are much lower than the West. So their very clear message is, ‘we want to do more and do it under the UN and not under any framework that’s competing with it but we’re not ready to take on a national cap but we’re ready to curb out emissions.’