China and U.S. to work on climate change
Joint agreement for nations seeks to enhance ambition
The United States and China announced a joint agreement Wednesday to “enhance ambition” on climate change, saying they would work together to do more to cut emissions this decade while China committed for the first time to reduce methane, a potent greenhouse gas.
The pact between the world’s two biggest polluters came as a surprise to the thousands of attendees gathered here for a United Nations climate summit. China and the United States, rivals that face growing tensions over trade, human rights and other issues, spoke as allies in the fight to keep global warming to relatively safe levels.
“We both see the challenge of climate change is existential and a severe one,” said Xie Zhenhua, China’s climate change envoy. “As two major powers in the world, China and the United States, we need to take our due responsibility and work together and work with others in the spirit of cooperation to address climate change.”
John Kerry, the U.S. special envoy for climate, followed the remarks from Xie with an assessment of his own.
“The U.S. and China have no shortage of differences,” said Kerry, a former secretary of state with a long history of negotiating with the Chinese. “But on climate, cooperation is the only way to get this job done.”
Still, the joint agreement was short on specifics. It did not extract a new timetable from China under which the country would ratchet down emissions, nor did China set a ceiling for how high its carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases would reach before they started to fall. China agreed to “phase down” coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel, starting
in 2026, but did not specify by how much or over what period of time.
The announcement from China and the United States came on the same day that summit organizers issued an initial draft of a new global agreement to fight climate change that called on
countries to “revisit and strengthen” by the end of 2022 plans for cutting greenhouse gas emissions and to “accelerate the phasing-out of coal and subsidies for fossil fuels.”
The language on coal and government fossil fuel subsidies would be a first for a U.N. climate
agreement if it stays in the final version.
Yet many countries and environmentalists said the rest of the document was still too vague on crucial details like what sorts of financial aid richer nations should provide poorer ones struggling with the costs of climate disasters and adaptation.
The draft “is not the decisive language that this moment calls for,” said Aubrey Webson, chairman of the Alliance of Small Island States, a group of countries that are among those most threatened by climate change.
Scientists have said that nations need to cut global emissions from fossil fuels roughly in half this decade to keep average global temperatures from rising beyond 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) compared with preindustrial levels.
Beyond that threshold, the risks of deadly heat waves, droughts, wildfires, floods and species extinction grow considerably. The planet has already warmed 1.1 degrees Celsius.
Negotiators here from nearly 200 countries are likely to demand significant changes to the draft as the talks enter their last, most difficult stretch. By tradition, a new global agreement requires every party to sign on.
If any one nation objects, talks can deadlock.