Yellen urges China to step up climate finance efforts
Calls for more development investment
BEIJING — The Biden administration called on China on Saturday to do more to help developing countries combat climate change, urging the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases to back international climate finance funds that it has so far declined to support.
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen delivered the message during her second day of meetings in Beijing, where she is seeking to cultivate areas of cooperation between the United States and China. While China has expressed support for programs to help poor countries cope with the effects of climate change, it has been selective in choosing which funds to support, arguing that it is also a developing nation.
Yellen said that China and the United States share a common interest on climate change and could make a more significant impact if the nations worked together.
“I believe that if China were to support existing multilateral climate institutions like the Green Climate Fund and the Climate Investment Funds alongside us and other donor governments, we could have a greater impact than we do today,” Yellen said at a meeting with a group of Chinese and international sustainable finance experts Saturday morning.
Yellen also raised climate finance and the debt difficulties of developing countries during a meeting Saturday afternoon with Vice Premier He Lifeng, her counterpart who oversees
China’s economy.
In remarks at the beginning of that meeting, Yellen noted that the United States and China “face important global challenges, such as debt distress in emerging markets and developing countries and climate change, where we have a duty to both our own countries and to other countries to cooperate.”
Yellen and He met in a conference room and then had dinner together for a total of nearly seven hours.
It was a marathon session nearly rivaling the 7½ hours that Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Foreign Minister Qin Gang of China spent in a meeting followed by dinner three weeks ago in Beijing, as the Biden administration tries to forge a deeper level of communication with the Chinese government.
He has seldom met with foreign officials or business executives in recent years, and many of his personal views on policy are a mystery, prompting a strong desire by US officials to establish more communication with him.
The Treasury Department, in a statement following the meeting, described the conversation as “candid, constructive and comprehensive.” While Yellen raised “issues of concern,” she also “discussed the administration’s approach to seeking a healthy economic competition with China, with a level playing field for American workers and businesses.”
“Secretary Yellen also conveyed that even when the United States and China have disagreements, it is vital that the two countries find ways to work together on issues of shared — and global — concern, including debt distress in low-income and emerging economies and climate finance,” the statement said.
The United States and China are both facing pressure from developing countries to mobilize more money for developing countries that are struggling to shut down coal plants, develop renewable energy, or cope with the consequences of climate change by building sea walls, improving drainage or developing early warning systems for floods and cyclones.
Under Barack Obama, the United States pledged $3 billion over four years to the Green Climate Fund, a United Nations-led program aimed at helping poor countries. So far it has delivered $2 billion of that pledge. Republicans have sought several times to block taxpayer spending for the fund and other climate finance, but President Biden has used discretionary spending within the State Department to fulfill part of the US pledge.
China pledged $3.1 billion, and it has delivered about 10% of that, according to studies. It also gives money to developing nations through what its leaders call “South-South” cooperation.
That’s because under the UN climate body, China is still considered a developing country and not an industrialized nation, although China now has a far larger manufacturing sector than any other country.
It has long resisted pressure to contribute to the same climate funds as wealthy nations.
Ma Jun, the director of the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs, a research group in Beijing, said that China was willing to help developing countries cope with climate change and manage the transition to a warmer world.
But harm to developing countries is already being caused by accumulated emissions released largely by industrialized countries, and it is those countries that should bear most of the responsibility, he said.
“The industrialized countries need to fulfill their obligations that have long been neglected,” Ma said.
Ma was echoing the Chinese government’s position. “It is not the obligation of China to provide financial support” under the UN climate rules, Xie Zhenhua, China’s climate envoy, said in an interview last year after the creation of a new multilateral fund to help poor countries address economic losses from climate disasters.
John Morton, a former climate counselor for the Treasury Department under the Biden administration, said any meaningful contribution by China could help the United States make the case to members of Congress and others to approve climate finance. He also said there may be other ways the two superpowers could work together to help developing nations slash coal use or curb methane, a potent greenhouse gas that leaks from oil and gas wells.
“That would be hugely consequential for the world,” he said. “Any time there’s an opportunity to forge a closer relationship with China on climate, it is an opportunity that should be taken up immediately.”
The United States and China are joint leaders of the Sustainable Finance Working Group at the Group of 20, providing the two countries an opportunity to work more closely on global climate matters.
‘We have a duty to both our own countries and to other countries to cooperate.’ TREASURY SECRETARY JANET YELLEN, on the duty of the United States and China to back international climate finance funds