WASHINGTON — The threat of climate change is driving China and the U.S. — frequent rivals and the world’s two largest greenhouse-gas emitters — to collaborate on dozens of potential clean-energy breakthroughs.
In research laboratories on opposite sides of the Pacific Ocean, more than 1,100 Chinese and American scientists are engaged in a joint program marrying public and private money and talent. Among the U.S. companies teamed with Chinese partners are Dow Chemical, Duke Energy and Ford.
The cooperation contrasts with the two nations’ longstanding differences over a range of issues, including intellectual property, human rights, cyberspying and, notably, the terms of a global treaty on climate change. While President Barack Obama plans to join other world leaders in New York on Tuesday for a United Nations climate summit, Chinese President Xi Jinping won’t be there. Nor will Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India, the third largest emitter.
The diplomatic inaction means that advances in technology may represent the planet’s best hope for avoiding runaway warming. Innovations from the U.S.-China brainstorming could spread to developing countries, allowing the world’s fastest- growing nations to avoid repeating the advanced economies’ fossil-fuel dependence.
“What can be more effective than the two largest emitters of CO2, or greenhouse gases, going at it together, arm-in-arm?” said James Wood, director of advanced coal technology research for the U.S.-China Clean Energy Research Center at West Virginia University. “It sends some signals to people in the world that it can be solved and these are the two giants that can do it.”
The low-budget cooperation on everything from energy- efficient buildings to new lithium-sulfur vehicle batteries is a rare bright spot in the Sino-U.S. relationship. Tensions have risen this year over the South China Sea and China’s treatment of foreign multinational corporations.
The energy and environmental effort, which dates to Obama’s first visit to China in 2009, got off to a slow start.
U.S. companies worried that their Chinese partners might pilfer trade secrets. And the Obama administration’s failure to win congressional approval of a cap-and-trade system to reduce greenhouse gases raised doubts in China about U.S. sincerity.
The intellectual property worries were resolved with a government-to-government agreement on the handling of disputes. The political hesitancy was overcome after last year’s “Airpocalypse,” several days of hazardous air that prompted Chinese citizens to don facemasks and agitate for change.
In July 2013, the U.S. and Chinese governments agreed to five specific climate-change initiatives.
The research center, now in its fourth year, has no physical headquarters. It’s a virtual facility with advanced coal, vehicle and building-efficiency programs running 88 separate projects. Each brings together teams of American and Chinese specialists to work on a specific problem or technology.
The center is one of several overlapping U.S.-China efforts to promote clean energy or environmental improvement.
Partnership between the U.S. and China “will set the tone for the world,” Bill Gates, co-founder and former chairman of Microsoft, told a recent meeting in Seattle of the Boao Forum for Asia, a Chinese nonprofit group.
Unless supplies of “low carbon or no carbon energy” are tripled or quadrupled, heat waves that now occur once every 20 years will become every-other-year phenomenon, said Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the UN’s Intragovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Earth’s temperature has already risen 0.85 degrees Celsius (1.53 degrees Fahrenheit) from the pre-industrial era and will reach a total increase of 4.8 degrees Celsius by the end of this century, more than twice the UN’s goal, he told the Boao Forum.
“That will clearly lead to disaster,” Pachauri said.