The United States and China failed to reach new climate agreements despite “productive” conversations, special climate envoy John Kerry said Wednesday after a four-day visit to Beijing, an outcome that underscores the tensions between the world’s two biggest carbon polluters and economies.
Kerry said the hours of closed-door meetings with senior Chinese officials revealed “things we clearly agreed on,” with both sides committing to regular meetings, including one in the next few weeks. He still expressed hope of achieving breakthroughs that could keep the planet from experiencing disastrous climate change.
“We had a very extensive set of frank conversations and realized that it’s going to take a little bit more work to break the new ground,” Kerry said in a call with the media. “So we’ve agreed that we’re going to meet intensively.”
Even without any immediate breakthroughs, the fact that the two sides committed to regular conversations represents a substantial step in restoring trust between the two countries at a time when overall relations are at their modern nadir, veterans of international climate diplomacy said.
But neither Kerry nor his Chinese counterpart, Xie Zhenhua, has the final say on climate policy in their respective countries. Chinese President Xi Jinping ultimately decides policy in Beijing, while Kerry’s boss — President Joe Biden — faces limits imposed by federal courts increasingly skeptical toward executive actions and congressional Republicans who oppose the administration’s climate policies.
Even so, the tensions between the nations on other issues like Taiwan, human rights, their military rivalry and economic competition had left little hope for a major announcement on climate. So some saw any positive sign at all as good news.
Climate change is “probably not our highest priority in dealing with China, but if we can get them to reduce their emissions that would be a good thing,” Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) told POLITICO before Wednesday’s announcement. “Our relationship is fraught given they are adversaries and competitors.”
Kerry and Xie, who have met dozens of times over the years, held hours-long meetings to re-engage formal negotiations since the former secretary of State arrived in Beijing on Sunday. Kerry said he and his team also met with high-level government officials in China, including vice president Han Zheng, Premier Li Qiang and Wang Yi, a top foreign affairs officer.
“The conversations we had with the leadership were clear about some of their concerns with respect to security and the marketplace and some of the tensions that are existing between the United States on some other issues,” Kerry said. “People were frank about it. But at the same time, they embraced the criticality of moving with urgency to deal with the climate crisis.”
Kerry said shared goals to be discussed over the next meetings include boosting renewable power to displace coal on the electricity grid, addressing greenhouse gases like methane, developing enhanced national climate plans that nations are expected to submit in 2025 and ensuring success at this year’s U.N. climate talks in Dubai.
David Sandalow, a former senior official at the Department of Energy during the Obama administration and founder of the U.S.-China program at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy, called the outcome of the talks “as expected.”
“Normal climate diplomacy between the U.S. and China is back on track,” he said.
Nate Hultman, former senior advisor to John Kerry who negotiated the U.S.-China Joint Glasgow Declaration on Enhancing Climate Action and director of the University of Maryland’s Center for Global Sustainability, called the firm commitments for future meetings “a victory in Kerry’s efforts to restart climate cooperation” ahead of the upcoming U.N. climate talks.
But Republicans lawmakers blasted the Biden administration over the outcome of Kerry’s talks with China.
“Joe Biden’s playing right into China’s hands,” Senate Energy and Natural Resources Ranking Member John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) said at a press conference. “China is not going to give up their economy for the environment.”
Michael McCaul (R-Texas), chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said “Kerry returning from his China trip with nothing from the [Chinese Communist Party] beyond plans for future talks is just another example of how this administration has no China strategy.”
“Diplomacy can be effective but not from a position of weakness — the administration must have clear goals and asks when it comes to China,” McCaul said.
The Chinese leadership was never likely to make significant news — doing so would give the appearance of acquiescing to the United States, said Jake Schmidt, senior strategic director for international climate at the Natural Resources Defense Council.
And it is not exactly clear how the U.S. or Kerry could prod China to curb its greenhouse gas emissions. China has vowed to peak its carbon pollution by 2030 and hit carbon neutrality by 2060, but resisted calls from the U.S. and international community ahead of last year’s U.N. climate talks in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, to accelerate its near-term target. And despite outperforming its aggressive renewable energy targets, China is also permitting an average of two coal-fired power plants every week.
Xi said Wednesday that China’s climate commitments are “unswerving,” but reiterated that China would resist pressure from other nations to adjust its targets or plans.
“But the path, method, pace and intensity to achieve this goal should and must be determined by ourselves, and will never be influenced by others,” according to a report by Chinese state news agency Xinhua.
Kerry told reporters that he did not view Xi’s remarks as a rebuke of climate cooperation with the U.S.
“We’re not involved in dictating anything to anybody. We’re involved in following the science,” Kerry said. “And if anything, the science dictates the parameters that we all need to live by.”
Xi’s comments reflect the fact that “Neither government wants to be coerced or appear to be coerced by the other,” Sandalow said.
A Chinese state media recap of Kerry’s meeting with Qiang framed China as a developing country, adding that Li said, “Developed countries should take the lead in reducing emissions and fulfill their financial commitments as soon as possible while developing countries should make contributions within their capacity.” China, which has the world’s second-largest economy, has positioned itself as a developing country to deflect criticisms that it is not slashing carbon pollution fast enough.
Republicans have accused Biden of pushing clean energy policies that would allow China to dominate the U.S. energy supply. They also have scoffed at the idea that China is a developing country and last week pressed Kerry to urge China to drop that notion. Kerry said that was “not going to happen on this visit” given how closely China guards that label, though he said “the Chinese government understands that this is a growing issue of concern.”
Xi has consistently said that “China is not going to throw out its old way of living until we have a new way of making a living in place,” said Erica Downs, a senior research scholar at the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University. “Basically what he meant by that is we are not getting rid of our coal power system until we have enough renewables and storage in place.”
Recent trends have reinforced that reality. China has fallen back on increased coal production as it seeks to emerge from an economic slump and cope with energy insecurity resulting from Russia’s war in Ukraine, said Kevin Gallagher, director of the Global Policy Development Center at Boston University. China witnessed Europeans turn to more coal and natural gas in the wake of the invasion and saw the U.S. rush its gas to help them weather supply shocks, he noted.
The fact that this week’s dialogue occurred at all was perhaps the best case in the limited range of positive outcomes, Gallagher said, asserting that many U.S. officials don’t even know who their counterparts in China are anymore. It’s much different now than during the Obama years, when standing strategic and economic dialogues had the nations well acquainted with each other.
“Each side is looking at a black box,” he said.
In contrast, then-President Barack Obama and Xi made a joint announcement in Beijing in November 2014 pledging action to combat climate change. It was the first time China had accepted responsibility for reducing carbon pollution and helped create momentum for the Paris climate agreement the next year.
“The state we’re at is I don’t think China announces stuff alongside the United States anymore,” Schmidt said. “The political space for both sides to do that is pretty small.”
Recent comments from Chinese state media and political leaders in Beijing emphasized that climate cooperation hinges on the overall relationship between the rival countries improving. A Chinese government account of Kerry’s Tuesday meeting with Wang said climate cooperation “cannot be separated” from the broader relationship.
A raft of recent visits from top Biden officials, including Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, aimed to squash what still divides the two nations. Dialogue had frozen for nearly a year over then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s August 2022 visit to Taiwan. The move was an affront to Beijing, which does not view Taiwan as an independent nation.
Economic clashes have intensified in the year since as the U.S. poured hundreds of billions of subsidies into wresting supply chains for electric vehicles, clean energy, batteries and semiconductors away from China.
Kerry is “on a different set of eggshells than he would be because this issue itself now has geopolitical undertones,” Gallagher said.
Kerry has long hoped to cordon off climate from those broader spats. A working group between the two nations to address shared climate challenges never got off the ground after they announced it at the 2021 U.N. climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland.
Yet areas for cooperation remain within reach. Reducing emissions of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, is one area for potential progress, Downs said. She said two of China’s national oil companies already document their methane emissions and that China has been working on a plan to reduce methane, which it agreed to do in its joint statement with the U.S. in Glasgow.
“If you want to start reducing the rate of global warming as fast as possible, methane is where it’s at,” she said. “I suspect there are issues related to methane emissions and methane emissions management where the two countries could learn from each other.”
China may also be keen to bolster the climate-related finance it offers to international partners, said Byford Tsang, senior adviser with European environmental think tank E3G. Yet much still divides them. China already has done this to a degree with its Belt and Road Initiative and its South-South finance program. It prefers to channel finance through bilateral efforts so it can exert control, he noted. Kerry and global leaders have stumped for more finance through any available avenues given it will take trillions of dollars to meet global climate goals.
“China has actually done something on this front,” Tsang said.