The US and China agree to replace fossil fuels by boosting renewable energy sources
The United States and China, the world’s two biggest climate polluters, have agreed to jointly tackle global warming by boosting wind, solar and other renewable energy with the aim of displacing fossil fuels, the ministry said. Foreign Affairs Tuesday.
The announcement comes as President Biden prepares to meet Wednesday with President Xi Jinping of China for their first face-to-face conversation in a year. The climate deal could emerge as a bright spot in talks that are likely to focus on sensitive topics including Taiwan, the war in Ukraine and the war between Israel and Hamas.
The cooperation statements released separately by the United States and China include no pledge by China to phase out its intensive use of coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel, or to stop licensing and building new coal-fired power plants . That has been a sticking point for the United States in months of discussions with Beijing over climate change.
But both countries agreed to “continue efforts to triple global renewable energy capacity by 2030.” That growth should reach levels high enough “to accelerate the substitution of coal, oil and gas generation,” the agreement said. Both countries expect “meaningful absolute emissions reductions in the energy sector this decade,” the report says. That appears to be the first time China has agreed to reduce emissions in any part of its economy.
The agreement comes two weeks before representatives of nearly 200 countries meet in Dubai as part of the United Nations climate talks known as COP28. The United States and China have an outsized role to play as countries debate whether to phase out fossil fuels.
Earlier this month, John Kerry, Biden’s climate envoy, met with his Chinese counterpart, Xie Zhenhua, at the Sunnylands estate in California to lay the groundwork for the deal announced Tuesday.
“The United States and China recognize that the climate crisis has increasingly affected countries around the world,” the statement said Sunnylands Declaration on Enhancing Collaboration to Tackle the Climate Crisis say.
“Both countries emphasize the importance of COP 28 in meaningfully responding to the climate crisis during this critical decade and beyond” and pledge in the statement to “address one of the greatest challenges of our time for current and future generations of humanity .”
As part of the deal, China agreed to set reduction targets for all greenhouse gas emissions. That’s significant because China’s current climate target only covers carbon dioxide, leaving out methane, nitrous oxide and other gases that act like a blanket around the planet.
Methane is released from oil and gas activities and from mining and can be 80 percent more powerful as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide in the short term.
The Chinese government last week published a long-awaited blueprint for tackling methane, but analysts dismissed it as toothless because it did not set targets for emissions reductions.
The Sunnylands agreement also does not set targets, but says the two countries will work together to determine them.
China has refused to join the Global Methane Pledge, an agreement among more than 150 countries led by the United States and Europe that pledges to collectively cut emissions by 30 percent by 2030.
The United States and China also agreed that China will set emissions reduction targets for its entire economy in the next set of climate pledges – which countries are due to make in 2025. The current pledge calls for CO2 emissions to peak before 2030, but does not indicate how high they could go before the curve starts to bend, nor does it indicate how much emissions could fall as a result.
Manish Bapna, chairman of the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group, praised the US-China deal, calling it “a foundation of ambition” ahead of the UN climate summit in Dubai.
“This sends a strong message of cooperation on the existential challenge of our time,” Mr Bapna said. “What is important now is that both countries deliver on today’s promise.”
The deal is the culmination of months of negotiations between Mr. Kerry, 79, and Mr. Xie, 73, friends and sparring partners on climate for more than 25 years. Both came out of retirement to become climate envoys for their countries and have advocated for climate change diplomacy within their governments. Mr Xie, who suffered a stroke last year, is expected to retire after the UN summit in Dubai.
Their negotiations came to a standstill in 2022 after Nancy Pelosi, then Speaker of the House of Representatives, traveled to Taiwan, a move seen as provocative by Beijing. Then early this year, a US fighter jet shot down a Chinese spy balloon hovering over the continental United States.
In July, amid efforts by the Biden administration to improve ties, Mr. Kerry traveled to Beijing.
That attempt did not end in success. Mr Xi took advantage of Mr Kerry’s visit to deliver a speech in which he declared that China would never be “influenced by others” on its climate goals.
Still, Mr. Kerry said optimistically at the time that “we have paved the way” for a deal.
When it comes to climate change, no relationship is as important as the one between the United States and China.
The United States, the largest climate polluter in history, and China, the current largest polluter, together are responsible for 38 percent of the world’s greenhouse gases.
That means the two countries’ willingness to urgently reduce emissions will essentially determine whether countries can limit the average global temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.
That’s the threshold above which scientists say increasingly severe wildfires, floods, heat and drought will exceed humanity’s ability to adapt. The planet has already warmed by 1.2 degrees.
But neither the United States nor China will act quickly unless the other does. Both countries are taking steps to tackle emissions, but hardliners in each country argue the other is not doing enough, and each dismisses the other’s climate pledges as disingenuous.
Although the United States has cut emissions, Chinese officials say the U.S. goal of cutting pollution by at least 50 percent from 2005 levels by the end of this decade is inadequate.
Leaders in China are also acutely aware of America’s partisan divide on climate change and have little confidence that a future administration will deliver on Mr. Biden’s promises. Most Republican presidential candidates refuse to acknowledge the established science of climate change, and the front-runner, Donald Trump, has pledged to halt climate action and encourage more oil drilling, gas fracking and coal mining.
In contrast, U.S. lawmakers note that China’s emissions continue to grow and that the country has so far only pledged to peak sometime before 2030 and then maintain a plateau before declining. That’s unacceptable to most members of Congress, who believe China, the world’s second-largest economy, should develop at a pace comparable to that of the United States.