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You Nuo

Talk of green, not war, partnerships

By You Nuo (China Daily)
Updated: 2009-11-17 07:55

Using US President Barack Obama's visit to China as a peg, some American columnists have suggested (presumably for money and convenience) that Washington ask Beijing to "help out" in Afghanistan (a costly job -- $1 million for a solder a year) so that the Americans can "do more good things" to protect the world's environment.

But a more likely scenario, as many Chinese would argue, would be the other way round. The Chinese should never help the US in the Afghan war, because there are people, even if a few, who are still using the US as a shelter for their campaign to split a part of China bordering Afghanistan and Central Asia.

Theirs' is not just a slogan-shouting campaign, for they are experts at fanning racial hatred and violence. During a "protest march" earlier this year, they ransacked shops and even killed some passers-by.

The very same group has been smuggling opium, supplied by the Taliban, into China and then to other parts of the world. They've been trafficking people outside China, too, to fight alongside the Taliban in Afghanistan. Some have been caught and detained by the US in Guantanamo Bay and then relocated to comfortable places.

Chinese are perplexed by the standards used in all these operations, and it's not hard to understand why. That's why they cannot agree to help the US in Afghanistan. We do provide some humanitarian aid to Afghanistan, though.

Instead of trying to drag China into Afghanistan, the US should try to work more seriously with it on the environmental front, especially because next month's UN climate conference in Copenhagen looks less likely to come up with a comprehensive must-do plan acceptable to all countries.

Quite a number of environmental activists across the world must be feeling disheartened, if not angry, by the news that even the Copenhagen conference is too early for world leaders to decide on the things to do to save the Earth.

After staying away from the Kyoto Protocol (signed but not ratified by US Congress), America simply cannot act quickly enough to decide - through legislative negotiations - on how much there is to do.

There are other countries and regions, obviously influenced by the US' reluctance, that do not want to mend their ways and meet the Kyoto Protocol targets despite vowing to do so.

When China pledged in the UN in September that it would self-impose major emission cuts, some people even thought that the country had committed a mistake by yielding "too much under the West's pressure".

But as Dennis Pamlin, former WWF policy adviser and a visiting scholar to the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences told a friend of mine recently: "China's actions are much faster than negotiations."

While countries do need a global framework to fight climate change, Copenhagen can at least be "an opportunity for those who seek collaboration and concrete results to launch innovative initiatives" unilaterally.

So without waiting for the legislative process, China and the US can pool together some resources - from technology to money and planning to implementation - to launch a number of green projects in places and among communities that are most vulnerable to global warming, such as those in Africa, Asia (outside China) and Latin America.

This seems a more realistic and forward-looking scenario. The movie 2012, released to coincide with Obama's China visit, has an important message - even though it is entirely fiction. If environmental deterioration gets serious enough (which looks increasingly likely), and somewhere in the world a community is unable to defend itself, it would take an international-level public infrastructure project - be it a modern-day ark, massive desalinization facility or "new agriculture" - to save it.

I wish to see Chinese and US green engineers and volunteers working together on such projects across the world, because that is what is needed, not Chinese soldiers in Afghanistan.

E-mail: younuo@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily 11/17/2009 page9)