[The two countries said they would
treat global warming “with the seriousness and urgency that it demands.”]
The agreement, which included few
specific commitments, was announced on Saturday night, Washington time, after
President Biden’s climate envoy, John Kerry, visited China for three days of
talks in which the negotiators managed not to be sidetracked by those disputes.
“It’s very important for us to try
to keep those other things away, because climate is a life-or-death issue in so
many different parts of the world,” Mr. Kerry said in an interview on Sunday
morning in Seoul, where he met with South Korean officials to discuss global
warming. “What we need to do is prove we can actually get together, sit down
and work on some things constructively.”
The agreement comes only days
before President Biden is scheduled to hold a virtual
climate summit with world leaders, hoping to prod countries to do more
to reduce emissions and limit planetary warming to 1.5 degrees
Celsius above preindustrial levels. Many scientists now argue that warming
must be kept below that threshold to avert catastrophic disruptions to life on
the planet.
China’s leader, Xi Jinping, is
among those who have been invited to the virtual summit. While he has yet to
publicly accept the invitation, the agreement with Washington appeared to make
his participation more likely.
On Friday, Mr. Xi said that China
remained committed to climate goals he had announced last fall, including a
promise that its carbon
emissions would peak before 2030. At the same time, Mr. Xi suggested that
the world’s most advanced nations had a responsibility to take the lead in
making deeper cuts.
In what seemed to be a retort to
the United States, he warned that the climate issue should not be “a bargaining
chip for geopolitics” or “an excuse for trade barriers.”
“This is undoubtedly a tough
battle,” Mr. Xi said in a conference call with President Emmanuel Macron of
France and Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, according to an account of the
meeting issued by the Chinese foreign ministry.
“China is sure to act on its words,
and its actions are sure to produce results,” he went on. “We hope that the
advanced economies will set an example in momentum for emissions reductions,
and also lead the way in fulfilling commitments for climate funding.”
The White House has signaled that
Mr. Biden will announce more ambitious plans for reducing emissions
domestically, after four years in which his predecessor, Donald J. Trump,
disparaged the issue.
“We’ve seen commitments before
where everybody falls short,” Mr. Kerry said. “I mean, frankly, we’re all
falling short. The entire world right now is falling short. This is not a
finger-pointing exercise of one nation alone.”
Mr. Kerry met
in Shanghai with his Chinese counterpart, Xie Zhenhua, over three days, in
talks that at one point went late into the night. Mr. Kerry said they stayed
focused on climate change and did not touch on increasingly rancorous disputes
over issues like China’s political crackdown in Hong Kong and its
threats toward Taiwan.
On Friday, even as the two envoys
met, the State Department sharply criticized prison
sentences handed down in Hong Kong to prominent pro-democracy leaders,
including Jimmy Lai, a 72-year-old newspaper tycoon. On the same day,
China warned the United States and Japan against “collusion”
as Mr.
Biden met at the White House with Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga, with
China’s rising ambitions one of the major issues on the table.
Chinese officials and the state
news media noted Mr. Kerry’s visit but markedly played it down, focusing
instead on Mr. Xi’s meetings. But in the joint statement with the United
States, the Chinese government pledged to do more on climate, though without
detailing any specific steps.
The statement said that both
countries would develop “long-term strategies” to reach carbon neutrality — the
point when a country emits no more carbon than it removes from the atmosphere —
before the next international climate conference in November, in Glasgow.
In a joint statement after the White House meetings
between Mr. Biden and Mr. Suga, the United States and Japan said they intended
to reach carbon neutrality by 2050 by promoting renewable energy sources,
energy efficiency and storage, and through innovations in capturing and
recycling carbon from the atmosphere.
Despite Mr. Biden’s renewed focus
on global warming after Mr. Trump’s term, Chinese officials have in recent
weeks chided the United States for demanding that other countries do more. They
noted that Mr. Trump had pulled the United States out of the 2015 Paris
climate agreement, in which most countries committed to targets for
reducing emissions.
China has since presented itself as
the more responsible leader on the issue, even though it is now the world’s
worst emitter of carbon dioxide, accounting for 28 percent of the world’s
total. The United States is second, at 15 percent.
Mr. Xi pledged last year that China
would reach carbon neutrality by 2060 and that its emissions would peak before
2030. Environmentalists have welcomed those promises but pressed for more
details about the steps China would take to reach them.
Mr. Kerry said China was
effectively pledging to move more quickly than Mr. Xi had initially promised,
by “taking enhanced climate actions that raise ambition in the 2020s,” as the
statement put it. The two countries will continue to meet to discuss the issue,
Mr. Kerry added.
China’s new five-year economic
plan, unveiled in March, offered few new specifics for reaching Mr. Xi’s stated
emissions goals, raising concerns that they might be more aspirational than
actual. China has continued, for example, to approve new coal plants, one of
the leading sources of carbon emissions, prioritizing social
stability and the development of an important domestic industry.
“For a big country with 1.4 billion
people, these goals are not easily delivered,” Le Yucheng, the vice minister of
foreign affairs, told The Associated Press in an interview on Friday. “Some counties are asking
China to do more on climate change. I’m afraid that is not very realistic.”
Chris Buckley contributed reporting
from Sydney, Australia.