Announcements abound when heads of state visit each other. So it is nice to see the MOU’s signed dominated by clean technology “deals”.
Now I put the word “deals” in quotation marks simply because they are Memorandums of Understanding. To give you my own historical perspective, when I travelled with Prime Minister of Quebec, Bernard Landry, in 2002, as part of Mission Quebec’s business crew, we signed over $1.5Million of MOU’s…nothing came of them. Essentially its a wink-wink understanding that corporations make with their leaders in order to help justify the trip and form the perception of “collaboration”.
As per the link above, most of the deals are huge american corporations wanting to expand market in China. That’s great in principle, the execution is what we should care about. While I do not question the honesty of the desire to improve China’s environmental record, the issue becomes whether or not results come from the signatures.
Leaders are great at public relations and I learned a lot on that trip. The PR crew assigned to the Prime Minister even helped in the negotiations of the MOUs and the publicity surrounding them. ICP Solar got front page news on all of Montreal’s newspapers…and all this while I was still in South America. I found out through my assistant and wife who told me of the umpteen phone calls of congratulations. I knew deep inside that it was just PR, yet didn’t want to damper the excitement of my crew at the time. Later on, we began to understand that even if just for the PR value, we were blessed to have had the opportunity to do the trip to begin with.
I do hope that at least a few MOUs become reality from this recent trip of the Chinese leadership to the USA. It does however bode well that the attention given to “green” continues to improve….
Sass