As world sizzles, China says it will deal with climate its own way
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Xi did not see Kerry. Instead, he gathered top Chinese Communist Party officials to set his own environmental agenda, without input from the United States.
China would pursue its commitments “unswervingly,” but the pathways, intensity and pace of such efforts “should and must be” determined without outside interference, Chinese state media reported Xi saying.
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Kerry’s visit, which ended Wednesday, was a test of whether the two countries can still find common ground as they did ahead of the 2015 Paris climate accord. Then, a Chinese-U.S. agreement paved the way for the international goal of keeping global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels.
The urgency of living up to those ambitions has been brought into sharp focus in recent weeks by historic heat waves across China, southern Europe, the Middle East and North America. Rising average temperatures intensified by the El Niño climate pattern put 2023 well on course to be the hottest year since humanity started keeping track.
China’s actions — especially how quickly it can move from coal to renewable energy — will be critical for the world’s already slim chances of meeting the Paris agreement target.
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Beijing has set its own target of reversing rising carbon dioxide emissions before 2030, but it has also promised to support a global transition to clean energy by no longer building coal power plants overseas.
Xi’s message — delivered at the same time Kerry was in town — was no coincidence, according to Li Shuo, a senior policy adviser for Greenpeace East Asia. Xi was showing that “China will decide its own path in achieving carbon goals and will not be ordered about by others,” he said.
Climate negotiations between the two countries, once a rare bright spot in a fraught relationship, have increasingly been undermined by tensions over trade, technology and human rights. Beijing suspended talks in August to retaliate for then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) visiting self-governed Taiwan, which Beijing claims as its own.
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Considering the tricky diplomatic backdrop, talking itself is progress, climate advocates say. But it is still a long way from the accelerated reduction of emissions that the United Nations has ruled necessary to meet the Paris climate accord goals.
Kerry spent a 12-hour day with his Chinese counterpart, Xie Zhenhua, on Monday. When he saw Vice Premier Han Zheng on Wednesday, Kerry called for climate to be a “free-standing” issue, kept separate from the broader bilateral acrimony.
But many Chinese experts framed the visit as being part of a tentative diplomatic reset, following trips by Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen, rather than a breakthrough in climate negotiations.
China has bristled at a shift in the Biden administration’s climate approach, in which talks are supplemented by more coercive measures, like tariffs on high-emission steel and aluminum imports, to push China to move faster.
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The United States was “ignoring China’s contributions and achievements in reducing emissions and blindly pressures China to make unrealistic commitments,” Chen Ying, a researcher at the state-run Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said in an interview with local media.
But it isn’t just pressure from the United States that is compelling China to act.
Flash floods, sudden cold snaps and other deadly extreme weather events in recent years have raised public awareness in China of the dangers of a warming atmosphere. The government has responded with promises to improve warning systems and disaster response mechanisms to protect livelihoods, the economy and even precious historical artifacts during future crises.
But people in China are feeling the extremes this summer. Temperatures in northern parts of the country have reached searing heights in recent weeks, even as torrential rainfall and typhoons batter its southeastern shores.
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A record high of 52.2 degrees Celsius (126 Fahrenheit) was recorded Sunday in a small township in the Turpan Depression, a stretch of desert in the northwest that sinks as low as 150 meters below sea level.
At the opposite end of the country, southeastern Guangxi province issued a red alert for flooding and landslides on Tuesday as Typhoon Talim made its way inland.
Beijing’s response so far has prioritized mitigating fallout from the events themselves, rather than increasing its ambition to prevent atmospheric warming. This has environmental activists concerned that Beijing is putting energy security first, running counter to climate goals.
After last summer’s — also record-breaking — heat wave dried up reservoirs and caused power shortages from idled hydropower stations, the government has turned to coal to ensure the same doesn’t happen this year. Local authorities approved more coal power plants in 2022 than in any year since 2015.
Ensuring power supply during peak summer demand affected the welfare of every family, another vice premier, Ding Xuexiang, told one of China’s largest power providers over the weekend.
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To keep the air conditioning on, providers like CHN Energy, one of the world’s largest generators of coal-fired power, have been setting daily records for supply, the Global Times, a state-run newspaper, reported on Monday.
Environmentalists fear this continued reliance on polluting fossil fuels as a short-term fix to China’s power supply concerns will make it harder for the world’s largest emitter to bring its carbon emissions down to zero.
The Chinese government maintains that the increase in coal consumption is a necessary temporary measure and will be superseded by massive expansions of wind and solar power production.
Global Energy Monitor, a San Francisco-based environmental research group, estimates that China is on track to reach a goal of 1,200 gigawatts of renewable power five years ahead of schedule, in 2025 — a year before Beijing has pledged to phase down its reliance on coal power.
Vic Chiang in Taipei, Taiwan, contributed to this report.
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Source: The Washington Post
