Pelosi's Chinese Climate Change

Carbon reduction trumps human rights.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi took her climate crusade to China last week, urging that "we must work together" to address what she called this urgent challenge. Her junket won't change many Chinese minds but it does speak volumes about her party's changing priorities.
Back when Mrs. Pelosi was a rising liberal star her signature issue was human rights in China. In 1991, she famously unfurled a pro-democracy banner in Tiananmen Square. During the Clinton Administration, she argued against normalizing trade relations with China unless linked to human-rights progress. Yet throughout last week's China tour Mrs. Pelosi said nothing of note about human rights -- despite the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen massacre this week.
Mrs. Pelosi told us in a brief interview in Hong Kong that she had raised human rights "privately" with Chinese leaders. She explained that her previous human rights lobbying had been in a "personal capacity" as a mere Congresswoman, but now that she is Speaker she "speaks for Congress" and has to take a softer approach. That argument would be more credible had Mrs. Pelosi not regularly excoriated Republican Presidents for not doing more about Tibet and the other billion or so Chinese who lack basic political freedoms.
The reality is that her former convictions have fallen to the new liberal imperative of saving the world from carbon: "Workers rights, human rights, people's rights are part of environmental justice," she declared, in language that the leaders of a "People's Republic" can appreciate. With China now the world's No. 1 CO2 emitter, Democrats are desperate to sign up China for the follow-up to the Kyoto Protocol lest the exercise again be pointless.
A student at a Beijing university returned fire, asking Mrs. Pelosi what could be done that might convince American voters and Congress to cut back on emissions. "We have so much room for improvement," Mrs. Pelosi replied, according to the Associated Press. "Every aspect of our lives must be subjected to an inventory . . . of how we are taking responsibility."
At least she's honest about what her climate project would really mean state-side. Most Democrats have a kind of global-warming split personality: On the one hand, New York will be underwater unless we create millions of new green jobs by imposing a cap-and-trade tax. Yet they also ridicule anyone who points out that their carbon limits will result in huge new taxes and costs for people who use electricity, drive cars, buy groceries -- which is say, everyone.
Speaking earlier in Shanghai, the Speaker elaborated: "I think that from what I've heard so far from the Chinese side of this -- and I think we're all in this together -- that the economic aspects of it are very, very important to the Chinese as well." The Speaker was talking about "green investment," though what Beijing actually wants is for developed nations to hobble their own economies with a cap-and-tax regime that would send jobs and billions of dollars a year in transfer payments to China the way Kyoto has. So the Chinese economy would be more efficient, while the West would be less competitive.
Whatever Chinese leaders do collectively on climate change, they must be relieved that Mrs. Pelosi no longer wants to press very hard for individual rights.