John Kerry to visit China to restart climate negotiations
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Mr John Kerry’s trip will mark the first climate discussions between the US and China since August 2022.
PHOTO: REUTERS
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WASHINGTON – Mr John Kerry, US President Joe Biden’s special envoy for climate change, said on Thursday that he would travel to China later this month to restart global warming negotiations between the world’s two largest polluters.
Mr Kerry’s trip will mark the first climate discussions between the United States and China since August 2022, when China cut off talks in anger
The talks come as the highest global temperatures ever recorded, driven by the burning of fossil fuels as well as the climate pattern El Nino, bake both nations and much of the planet.
“We need genuine cooperation,” Mr Kerry said in an interview. “China and the United States are the two largest economies in the world, and we’re also the two largest emitters. It’s clear that we have a special responsibility to find common ground.”
The trip to China would be Mr Kerry’s third as climate envoy.
It follows visits by Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen aimed at stabilising the uneasy relationship between the US and China.
Mr Kerry said he planned to meet with his Chinese counterpart, Mr Xie Zhenhua, and other officials “at the highest levels” during the week of July 16.
China and the US are also the two largest investors in clean energy. Their policies have an outsize impact on whether the world will avert the worst consequences of global warming.
Yet there are deep divisions over the speed at which each country should stop the fossil fuel emissions that are dangerously heating the planet.
Republicans, who have been critical of Mr Blinken’s and Ms Yellen’s trips to China, denounced Mr Kerry’s trip and accused him of undermining the US.
“Despite not being confirmed by the US Senate, John Kerry is still negotiating with the Chinese Communist Party to push a radical Green New Deal agenda detrimental to American interests,” Representative James Comer of Kentucky said in a statement.
He accused Mr Kerry of making “closed-door deals” with the Chinese.
Next Thursday, Mr Kerry is scheduled to appear before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs oversight panel.
The US under Mr Biden has pledged to cut emissions roughly in half by 2030.
The Inflation Reduction Act passed by Congress
Combined with tougher pollution limits on tailpipes and smokestacks proposed by Mr Biden, the law could put the US within striking distance of its goal.
China’s emissions continue to grow, but President Xi Jinping has said it will peak its carbon pollution by 2030 and then stop adding it to the atmosphere altogether by 2060.
China burns more coal than the rest of the world combined. It approved more new coal power plants in 2022
But scientists warn that industrialised nations must make a sharp turn away from fossil fuels now to avert the most catastrophic consequences of climate change.
Mr Kerry said he intended to urge China to accelerate its phase-out of coal, combat deforestation and issue a plan to reduce emissions of methane, a potent greenhouse gas that leaks from oil and gas wells.
Those are issues China said it would address under a 2021 joint agreement with the US that so far has not been implemented.
“We’re really looking for some specific actions that are going to move the ball here,” Mr Kerry said. “If we can’t get China to work with us very aggressively to deal with this challenge, we all have a bigger problem.”
Mr Thom Woodroofe, a senior fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute, said formally re-establishing routine climate discussions would be the “crown jewel” of any outcome from Mr Kerry’s trip.
“Right now, we’re one geopolitical problem away from ending climate talks,” Mr Woodroofe said, noting that it has taken a year to “get back where we were” after China halted diplomatic talks on military issues, narcotics and climate change because of Mrs Pelosi’s Taiwan trip. Of those three, China has agreed to restore talks on only climate change.
Mr Kerry, 79, and Mr Xie, 74, each emerged from retirement to lead their country’s climate negotiations.
The men have worked together on some of the defining international policy breakthroughs of the last decade, including the 2015 Paris Agreement, in which nearly every nation pledged to reduce emissions to constrain average global temperatures from rising more than 1.5 deg C from pre-industrial levels.
That is the threshold beyond which scientists say the likelihood of catastrophic climate impacts significantly increase. The planet has already warmed an average of 1.2 deg C.
Mr Xie and Mr Kerry met a handful of times on the sidelines of a United Nations summit in Egypt in 2022, though aides said they were light discussions, largely centred around when more substantive negotiations could restart.
Mr Xie also suffered a stroke this year but is now “much better,” Mr Kerry said, adding the two men have been meeting virtually. NYTIMES
