The Guardian, UK on Monday led with a bombshell headline:

China and US held secret talks on climate change deal

“A high-powered group of senior Republicans and Democrats led two missions to China in the final months of the Bush administration for secret backchannel negotiations aimed at securing a deal on joint US-Chinese action on climate change, the Guardian has learned.

The initiative, involving John Holdren, now the White House science adviser, and others who went on to positions in Barack Obama’s administration, produced a draft agreement in March, barely two months after the Democrat assumed the presidency.”

Turns out the Joe Romm, one of the leading climate change bloggers, knows one of the main players. He brings a correction to the Guardian piece and says a real break through may be possible.

The Guardian headline of “secret meetings” was a hyped up way to describe “off the record meetings.”

The Guardian is correct that “The first communications, in the autumn of 2007, were initiated by the Chinese. Xie Zhenhua, the vice-chairman of the National Development and Reform Commission, the country’s central economic planning body.” The Guardian puffs up the role of the Bushies in this talk (see here), but in fact these talks were designed to get around the Bush administration intransigence on the issue.

Bill told me that Minister Xie “said that the Chinese government took the science of climate change seriously” and wanted help figuring out who they should talk to given the pending US election and the fact that the “Bush administration wasn’t doing anything.” China wanted to have off the record meetings with “potentially influential people” in the U.S. Presidential campaigns so that official negotiations could “hit the ground running” once a new administration was in power. China wanted to achieve an understanding with the United States before the big international climate negotiations meeting in Copenhagen this December — hence the desire to start the dialogue before January 20 of this year.

Bill told me, “I personally have the opinion that a deal is in reach.” That, of course, begs the question of what the deal is, which I discussed with Bill at length. Here is where the Guardian got the story quite wrong:

See the Guardian article here

Climate Progress here

And they’d better get going faster than the fast they are contemplating.

M.I.T. doubles its 2095 warming projection to 10°F — with 866 ppm and Arctic warming of 20°F

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