US climate chief says fraught relations with China spell ‘serious trouble’ for efforts to achieve goals

‘If climate becomes … one of the weapons in the bilateral back and forth, we’re cooked,’ John Kerry, the US special presidential envoy for climate, says
Kerry says that China and Russia are not moving quickly enough on climate goals, while acknowledging roadblocks in the US

Climate change

Owen Churchill

Published: 1:42am, 21 Apr 2022

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Climate cooperation between the United States and China is more fraught now than it was just months ago, due to deepening bilateral frictions that threaten to leave the world in “serious trouble”, Washington’s chief climate envoy warned on Wednesday.

Cooperation on ways to limit climate change is “harder now because some of the differences of opinion between our countries have been hardened and sharpened, and that makes the diplomacy more complicated”, John Kerry, the US special presidential envoy for climate, said.

Kerry said he believed that his Chinese counterpart, top climate diplomat Xie Zhenhua, was working in good faith to try to ramp up China’s climate action, but expressed concern that the issue could become a bargaining chip in the increasingly confrontational relationship. He did not specify which side would take such an approach.

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“If climate becomes one of the tools, one of the weapons in the bilateral back and forth, we’re cooked, we’re in serious trouble,” said Kerry, speaking at a virtual event hosted by the Washington-based Center for Global Development.

US-China relations have grown increasingly strained in recent months, amid complaints from Washington about Beijing’s refusal to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, as well as moves by China to enter into a security pact with the Solomon Islands.

Those new flashpoints come atop an extensive list of long-standing tensions that have characterised the relationship for the past several years, including complaints over human rights, technology disputes, trade tariffs, and territorial disputes in the South and East China Seas.

Against that backdrop, Kerry urged the US and China to keep the climate issue separated from other issues, stressing that both countries – along with the rest of the world – stood to suffer the consequences of rapidly melting ice caps.

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“That includes in China, where Shanghai, Tianjin and other cities will be immersed in water, as well as Boston and Florida and plenty of other places in the United States,” Kerry said.

“So people have got to get serious about this, which we just haven’t evidenced as a civilisation that we are yet as serious as we need to be.”

China has warned repeatedly that the US should not expect its cooperation on the climate crisis while frictions remain in other areas, though the two sides appeared to make progress in November when they signed an agreement pledging coordination on methane reduction and deforestation, among other issues.

Both sides were now working on instituting the pact’s provisions, but those efforts had been “complicated by other issues”, said Kerry, referring to bilateral frictions.

A worker uses a torch to cut steel pipes near the coal-powered Datang International Zhangjiakou Power Station in China’s northern Hebei province in November 2021. Photo: AFP

Concerns over how effectively China and the US – the world’s largest and second largest emitters of carbon dioxide – can work together on climate come as climate experts issue increasingly urgent warnings that time is running out to prevent disastrous overheating of the planet.

A panel of experts convened by the United Nations warned earlier this month that limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius – the ambition laid out in the multilateral Paris Agreement – would be beyond reach by the end of this decade unless countries significantly cut their dependence on coal, oil and gas.

China has pledged to peak its carbon emissions by 2030 and achieve carbon neutrality before 2060.

But Kerry lumped China together with Russia and other countries that he said were “not reducing their [carbon] footprint sufficiently”, while singling out Beijing for its continued reliance on coal.

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Despite a pledge to stop financing coal plants overseas, China continues to sign off on the construction of new coal plants at home, including a 2 gigawatt plant in Zhejiang province approved in February.

Kerry acknowledged that the US was also not doing enough to fund climate action, a failure he ascribed to congressional opposition to US President Joe Biden’s climate-related legislation.

Biden’s plan to mobilise US$555 billion to tackle the climate crisis hit a roadblock in December when the sweeping bill containing those provisions was sunk by congressional Republicans and Senator Joe Manchin, a West Virginia Democrat.

“It’s important for us to be able to go to countries in a credible way and say ‘look, we’ll help you provide an alternative for these people,’” said Kerry. “If the developed world doesn’t do that … it’s not going to happen.”