HONG KONG — For all their differences, the United States and China have one thing in common: Both their populations are sweating through one of the hottest summers on record.
As U.S. climate envoy John Kerry arrived in Beijing for talks with Chinese officials earlier this week, temperatures reached a record of almost 126 degrees Fahrenheit in China’s arid northwest. Meanwhile, millions of people across the U.S. are experiencing a relentless heat wave, with more records expected to be broken this week.
The stakes could hardly be higher.
Experts say that the extreme weather being experienced all over the world is largely driven by climate change, and that there is no solution without the U.S. and China, the world’s two biggest greenhouse gas emitters. But relations between the two countries have been bogged down by disputes over trade, human rights and the status of Taiwan, freezing climate diplomacy in place for much of the past year.
July 3, 202300:22
That has implications for the whole world, said Li Shuo, a senior global policy adviser in Greenpeace East Asia’s Beijing office.
When the U.S. and China work together on climate change, it pushes other countries to make progress as well, he said Tuesday. But “when they cannot talk to each other, the global climate conversation becomes collateral damage.”
Kerry’s trip to China, his third as U.S. climate envoy, is the first formal top-level climate diplomacy between the two countries since China suspended talks last August after Nancy Pelosi, the House speaker at the time, visited Taiwan, a self-governing island that Beijing claims as its territory. Kerry is the third senior U.S. official to visit China in recent weeks as the world’s two largest economies try to improve ties.
Kerry said cooperation on climate change, once a bright spot in U.S.-China diplomacy, could set the relationship back on course.
“Climate, as you know, is a global issue, not a bilateral issue,” he said Tuesday as he met with China’s top diplomat, Wang Yi. “It’s a threat to all humankind.”
Wang said U.S.-China cooperation on climate change had “huge potential” but that it could not be separated from the “overall environment” of bilateral relations, according to a readout from the Chinese Foreign Ministry.
Their meeting Tuesday came as Beijing endured a record 27th day this year of temperatures above 95 F.
During his trip, Kerry focused on issues such as deforestation and reducing methane emissions. He praised China’s world-leading advances in renewable energy but said they had been undercut by its accelerating construction of coal-fired power plants. He also encouraged China to “enhance its climate ambition,” according to a State Department readout.
The U.S. aims to reach net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, while China has twin goals of reaching peak emissions by 2030 and achieving net-zero emissions by 2060.
Chinese President Xi Jinping, who did not meet with Kerry, told a national conference on environmental protection in Beijing on Tuesday that while China is still committed to those goals, how it achieves them “should and must be determined by ourselves, and will never be influenced by others,” according to the state-run broadcaster CCTV.
The major disagreement between the two countries is “how much each should and have done,” said Li Zhengyan, an assistant professor in the University of Hong Kong’s department of politics and public administration, who studies environmental policy.
The U.S. expects China to do more because it is the world’s largest emitter and has a robust economy, he said, while China argues it is still a developing country and that developed countries such as the U.S. should take greater responsibility in fighting climate change because of their “enormous historical emissions.”
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nbcnews.com
