A Very Good Start

Hillary Clinton begins right away stressing the need to attack the global warming issue. I'm loving it!

Declaring “we hope you won’t make the same mistakes we made,” Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton invited China to join the United States in an ambitious effort to curb greenhouse gases, as she toured an energy-efficient power plant in Beijing on Saturday.

The gas-fired power plant, which uses sophisticated turbines made by General Electric, is nearly twice as efficient as the coal-fired plants that supply much of China’s electricity, and helped vault China past the United States as the world’s leading emitter of carbon dioxide.

The Obama administration hopes to make climate change the centerpiece of a broader, more vigorous engagement with China. For Mrs. Clinton, the two-day stop in Beijing at the end of a week-long Asian tour, represents an effort to put her own stamp on a relationship that was dominated by the Treasury Department in the latter years of the Bush administration.

Mrs. Clinton’s visit to the Taiyanggong Thermal Power Plant allowed her to steer the focus back to climate change. She introduced her new special envoy for climate change, Todd Stern, who noted that the United States and China account for 40 percent of the world’s emissions.