Kerry meets China’s climate envoy in Egypt as talks resume

UNITED STATES climate envoy John Kerry met his Chinese counterpart at the Cop27 climate summit in Egypt yesterday, in a further hint of improving relations between the world’s top two polluters a day after a meeting between their leaders.

Mr Kerry met China’s top climate official, Xie Zhenhua, at the Chinese delegation’s headquarters. “We’re able to talk, we’ll see what happens,” Mr Kerry said, before the meeting.

On Monday, at the G20 summit in Indonesia, China’s President Xi Jinping agreed to resume climate change talks with the US, during talks with US President Joe Biden. Mr Xi had put such contacts on hold three months earlier, in retaliation for US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s trip to Taiwan in August this year.

Government officials have been arriving in Sharm el-Sheikh since Monday to push for a substantial deal by the time Cop27 is supposed to finish on Friday, but officials from developing nations have been increasingly lashing out in anger and frustration at wealthy countries at the gathering, condemning them for not doing enough to cut back emissions or help them cope with a warming Earth.

Samoa’s prime minister appealed to countries to respond as strongly to the threat of global warming as they did to the coronavirus pandemic. Fiame Naomi Mata’afa said her country and other Pacific states are “at the mercy of climate change”.