John Kerry visits Beijing to restart stalled US-China climate talks

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US climate envoy John Kerry will arrive in China on Sunday to restart stalled negotiations over global warming between the world’s two largest polluters after a year long hiatus.

Formal climate talks between the US and China were halted by Beijing in 2022 in protest at House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s trip to Taiwan — although Kerry has informally met his counterpart, Xie Zhenhua, on the sidelines of climate events. 

Speaking to lawmakers on Capitol Hill on Thursday, Kerry said he hoped to make progress on talks with China over reducing methane emissions, transitioning away from coal, combating deforestation and on jointly increasing the deployment of renewable energy technologies. 

“What we want to do is find ways to see if China and the United States can advance the cause together for the rest of the world by accelerating rates of doing things,” Kerry told lawmakers. 

“And if we can make some progress on that, we think we can tamp down this edgy sense of competition which could lead to a mistake, which takes you to a place you didn’t mean to go to.”

Despite Beijing’s retaliation for Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan, Washington has sought to insulate the climate talks from its broader relationship with China, which has deteriorated to its worst state since the powers established diplomatic relations in 1979. 

“The Chinese have never accepted that,” said Thom Woodroofe, of the Asia Society’s China Climate Hub. “For the Chinese, geopolitics is the tail that wags the climate dog, not the reverse”.

Woodroofe said the visit would be judged a success if Kerry and Xie went “back to where they were in 2021” and re-established a diplomatic framework to engage on climate issues. “In the last 12 months, there’s a sense that climate has fully fallen by the wayside,” said Woodroofe. 

In a joint statement with the US issued in Glasgow in 2021, China pledged to address methane emissions, a potent greenhouse gas. But it did not go as far as to join a US-EU pact to cut methane emissions by 30 per cent by 2030, and its plan for reducing its methane emissions remains unpublished. 

President Xi pledged in 2020 that China would reach peak CO₂ emissions by 2030 and achieve net zero emissions by 2060. Reaching that target would require reducing coal demand in China, which accounts for half of the world’s consumption, close to zero.

Byford Tsang, senior policy adviser at climate think-tank E3G, said “success” for Kerry would be measured on whether there was progress on issues agreed on before the climate talks were suspended.

“That would include signals from China that it’s stepping up on its climate target, in particular assurances that it is reining in its coal power sector, and the launch of an action plan to control methane emissions,” said Tsang.

E3G’s Alden Meyer said China could be pressed to take a bigger role in financing the green transition, including through contributions to the UN’s green climate fund.

Kerry’s trip to China, his third as Biden’s climate envoy, comes on the heels of US Treasury secretary Janet Yellen’s visit to Beijing earlier this month, and just one month after secretary of state Antony Blinken became the first Biden administration cabinet official to head to China.

The Biden administration is trying to kick-start regular high-level engagement after a long period during which the two countries had only intermittent contact. President Joe Biden and President Xi Jinping agreed in Bali last November that they needed to stabilise the US-China relationship.

But that effort was derailed earlier this year when a suspected Chinese spy balloon flew over North America and was shot down by US jets.

The visits by the senior US officials over the summer, and an expected visit by commerce secretary Gina Raimondo, are designed to create channels of communication so that the countries have mechanisms to deal with crises.

Yet US and Chinese officials say privately that they do not expect either side to change their strategic approach. For example, during her visit to China, Yellen told her counterparts that the US would continue to implement measures to protect its security — such as export controls — while China continued to object to Biden’s approach.

On Thursday, Kerry indicated that the visit was a part of an effort to “establish some stability”.

“I’m not going over with any concessions. What we’re trying to do is find ways we can co-operate to actually address the [climate] crisis,” he said.

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