TRANSCRIPT: WHITE HOUSE SCIENCE ADVISOR 3/25 BEIJING BRIEFING
(U.S. and China interested in environmental cooperation)

Beijing -- The United States and China have a mutual interest in cooperating in environmental research and protection in a wide variety of areas, according to Dr. Jack Gibbons, science advisor to President Clinton.

Gibbons, who is accompanying Vice President Gore on his visit to China, briefed reporters in Beijing March 25 after participating in a bilateral forum organized at the instigation the Vice President and Chinese Premier Li Peng.

There is "a good deal of convergence" between the two countries on the need for sustainable development, Gibbons said. There is a "mutual interest in achieving a mechanism for sustaining economic growth and at the same time protecting and enhancing our environment -- we believe it is a very important concept," he said.

"China and the United States are similar in some very important ways. We are the number one and two producers of (carbon dioxide) in the global atmosphere. We both are intensely dependent on coal in our energy production system," he said.

These symmetries, Gibbons said, led the forum participants to "scan across a number of present bilateral technical activities going on between different agencies of our government and China," looking for areas of cooperation such as coastal zone management, fresh water resource management, air quality monitoring, ozone levels, carbon dioxide levels, and joint research on the oceans.

"We've found that if we can combine our facilities, our boats, our air monitoring stations and the like along with our people then we can each gain much more knowledge than we would be able to separately. Even though China is in a different stage of economic development than we are there's a rapidly growing convergence that we have a good deal of mutual self interest in sharing information and out of that achieving our national goals," Gibbons concluded.

Following is the official transcript of Dr. Jack Gibbons's briefing:

(begin transcript)

THE WHITE HOUSE
OFFICE OF THE VICE PRESIDENT

DR. JACK GIBBONS
SCIENCE ADVISOR TO THE PRESIDENT
BRIEFING, BEIJING, CHINA

March 25, 1997

I'm Jack Gibbons, the President's science advisor and it was my pleasure to participate in this forum that was organized at the instigation of Vice President Gore and Premier Li Peng who gave the opening charge today at noon, and it was very interesting.

I think you got the feeling that there was a good deal of convergence in the way both of these people have been talking about the rising importance and mutual interest in achieving a mechanism for sustaining economic growth and at the same time protecting and enhancing our environment for today and also providing for the future and that's the general term of "sustainable development" -- and that's been questioned by a lot of people -- but we believe it is a very important concept.

It's essentially the transformation of an old paradigm that used to say if you want progress you need to smell smoke or hear noise or something because as I've described it today some of you are old enough to remember the old business letter heads in which at the top right hand corner would be an engraving of a plant factory with a chimney and smoke coming out of it, smoke symbolizing activity, profits, and production. We went through a time in the States -- and China is moving through some of these same times now -- where we realize now that smoke was an externality that was costing, it was a resource out of place, and that we should not only produce things but also do some cleanup. But they were seen as separate processes, one followed the other. And then we began to realize that if we think of both of these as part of the production process and integrate production and environmental protection at the same time, you can derive the same goods and services with far less cost. The not so secret ingredient is that you need to use advanced science and technology to do just that.

China and the U.S. are similar in some very important ways. We are the number one and two producers of CO2 in the global atmosphere. China's rate of increase is much faster than ours. We both are intensely dependent on coal in our energy production system. We are both getting increasingly interested, therefore, in how one can provide the energy goods and services with less CO2 and other things that go along with it. China is intensely interested in energy efficiency as well. So this and other subjects led us to a forum that enabled us to scan across a number of present bilateral technical activities going on between different agencies of our government and China to cut across these and try to provide a way of looking at the notion of sustainable development through four different examples. One is the use of science and technology throughout the system. Second is the energy system. Third is the environment in both these countries and things that can affect that. And fourth is the role of commerce in transforming knowledge into technical capabilities for achieving both environmental protection and production. Let me just briefly mention that some of the chairs of these sessions today are with me tonight. Terry Anne Jones, the associate director at OSTP in the White House, in the science area. Ray Commrants of the State Department and Bill Nitze from EPA in the environmental area. Ray Vickery from the Department of Commerce in the Commerce and Business area, and Charlie Curtis the Deputy Secretary in the energy area. So we covered all of those four sections today.

There was extraordinary feeling of mutual interest in cooperating in areas that ranged all the way from coastal zone management and fresh water resource management to air quality monitoring and recording to the use of remote sensing and the sharing of data on ozone levels, on CO2 and other measures of air quality to joint research projects on Chinese vessels and our own in terms of measuring the oceans, because the southern ocean is less well known than the northern oceans and because there is a lot of very interesting science going on now about how the atmosphere and the surface waters of the ocean interact and cause not only transfers of CO2 that can cause weather patterns and climate patterns that can shift one year to the next and even over 10 and 20 year cycles. So we're looking in other words not just at the short term weather effects, which we all need to know more about, and the very long term effects that come from the greenhouse, but also from these middle term multi-year effects that are indeed affecting our crops, our weather. What would be the storms in the Pacific Northwest, or the El Nino as it sweeps across Central America and South America or are these other so-called atmospheric oscillations.

In other words, we've found that if we can combine our facilities, our boats, our air monitoring stations and the like along with our people then we can each gain much more knowledge than we would be able to separately, and I think that the outcome of this was that there is an extraordinary convergence now. Even though China is in a different stage of economic development than we are there's a rapidly growing convergence that we have a good deal of mutual self interest in sharing information and out of that not only achieving our national goals, but also helping fulfill some of the historically bestowed upon us responsibilities for global environmental change simply because we are number one and number two in carbon dioxide production.

The forum does not substitute for our existing bilateral workday cooperative activities and progress, but it provides an opportunity with the kind of overarching attention and leadership given by the Vice President and by the Premier to put all these pieces together, to make the whole greater than the sum of the parts. And we've come out of this with some new understanding of some key things we need to work on even more intensively.

Let me give you a couple of examples. China's water resources are extremely tight and they're facing a population growth of 13 million people a year, rapid economic growth, and water availability per capita that means they have to become absolutely elegant in the way they use fresh water and water resources in providing for their future needs.

You can go through other examples like this that say China, like the U.S., is going to live more and more by its wits. And that by sharing some of this knowledge and research together, we're all going to come out ahead.

Q: Am I correct that what's about to happen on the Yangtze River is something that, if it were happening in the United States, the Vice President would not like? Is that fair to say?

MR. GIBBONS: Well, there are things on the Yangtze and also things on the Yellow River and both of them are disturbing. Let me start with the Yellow River. The Vice President this morning said that there were really four great original civilizations. And the civilizations occurred on certain great rivers. The Indus, the Nile, the Tigris-Euphrates, and the Yellow River. And that these river valleys were the four great cradles of civilization. And it is rather poignant to note now that for the first time since the Ice Age that the Yellow River, during parts of the year, is running dry before it reaches the sea. This portends very serious implications for not only China, but a sense we're out of balance between human activities. The reason the Yellow River is running dry is twofold -- one they've had some droughts, and two they're doing a lot of irrigation, removal of water from the Yellow River. So the Yellow River symbolizes the critical resource shortage in China. Now I think probably what you're speaking to in terms of the Yangtze is the Three Gorges Dam which is about to be closed this fall. That was not a matter of discussion today. It has been a matter of discussion between China and the U.S. in times past, and we have maintained in the past that we thought it was not a good investment, there were other ways to make energy, that this would flood a lot of people and fertile lands and the likes and we did not participate in the financing or the construction of the Three Gorges Dam. The Chinese, however, have found their financing, and are proceeding and will complete that dam. It amply, I think, also echoes the fact that the Chinese are very concerned about electricity availability and that the dam will produce I forget how many gigawatts of power. It will be the largest hydroelectric facility in the world.

(From the side) What is it Harry? Eighteen gigawatts...eighteen thousand megawatts.

Q: I did have one more question. Yesterday, in Tokyo, the Vice President called on China, India and other developing countries to try to limit the greenhouse gasses. Did this come up?

MR. GIBBONS: Oh yes. It was the heart of the discussion, in terms of one aspect of the environment and development, and that aspect is the long term planetary problem of increasing greenhouse gasses that are now carrying us into a global atmospheric (unintelligible) in which the industrial world has now added so much more CO2 and methane and the likes, that we will in the coming century we will go right past doubling probably, of the pre-industrial CO2. That in turn, those concentrations will carry us into a regime of the greenhouse effect, that has not been seen, probably, in 100,000 years.

Q: Did the Chinese have any problem with this idea that there should be legally binding targets?

MR. GIBBONS: We did not speak of legally binding targets although the Chinese and some of the other industrializing countries make the point that the CO2 production per capita in their countries is perhaps one tenth of what it is in the United States, and that the United States should lead in these efforts, and that as these countries develop they too will take their place.

Now China I think has recognized that they will shortly become in that class of leaders of CO2 production and they are more seriously recognizing the need to do something about it. Just as they, for instance, have shifted over their production of chloroflourocarbons to environmentally friendly refrigerator and other coolant gases, they too are looking to the question of how they can produce energy with less CO2 production. And their first focus is on efficiency. They feel that if they can increase their efficiency rapidly that will automatically knock down their CO2 per unit of energy produced by perhaps as much as a factor of two. So my impression is that the Chinese understand that if they aren't at the table of the leaders of this issue now, they will surely be so within ten years or slightly more, and that means they have to become a leader, not a follower.

Q: (First part unintelligible) ... they also point out that the U.S. didn't really get around to doing anything about the environment until average incomes were around 5,000 U.S. dollars a year. My question is, given that their resources are so limited, is the U.S. going to do anything to pitch in any cash to assist the Chinese in this area.

MR. GIBBONS: What's needed is not so much cash but experience and know how, and what they now understand is that like their cellular phones have leapfrogged the necessity to put copper wire up there, so too can they do a much better job of producing goods and services with less environmental cost, and that they'll save money that way too.

The one small example. It can take as much as a hundred times the amount of money to clean up a toxic waste area than to prevent it in the first place. So by cost avoidance of those externalities, they're going to come out ahead, and they're learning from our past experience in the States. So the old paradigm that says first you get rich, and then you go back and fix the environment is anachronistic now. We know that is not the best paradigm. The best paradigm is use technology and avoid the problem to begin with. You'll save money in the long run and have a complete life (as heard).

You know there was an old New Yorker cartoon -- you may not be old enough to remember this, Joe, but there were two people on a busy street corner, briefcases in hand, and one said to the other, "You know, the way I see it there's a trade-off for everything. If you want a high standard of living, you settle for a low quality of life." And that reflects that old paradigm that said somehow if you're going to get rich, than you'll have to suffer with these environmental insults. We know now that's an out of date idea.

Well I don't want to preach and it's late and you've had a long day but if you have any other questions I'll be happy to talk with you. Thank you.

(end transcript)