In Short : The climate agreement between the two countries is seen as a bright spot as President Biden prepares to meet President Xi Jinping.
In Detail : The United States and China, the world’s two largest climate polluters, have agreed to jointly tackle global warming by ramping up wind, solar and other renewable energy with the goal of displacing fossil fuels.
The announcement comes as President Biden prepares to meet Wednesday with President Xi Jinping of China for their first face-to-face discussion in a year. The climate agreement could emerge as a bright spot in talks that are likely to focus on sensitive topics including Taiwan, the war in Ukraine and the war between Israel and Hamas.
The statements of cooperation released separately by the United States and China on Tuesday do not include a promise by China to phase out its heavy use of coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel, or to stop permitting and building new coal plants. That has been a sticking point for the United States in months of discussions with Beijing on climate change.
But both countries agreed to “pursue efforts to triple renewable energy capacity globally by 2030.” That growth should reach levels high enough “so as to accelerate the substitution for coal, oil and gas generation,” the agreement says. Both countries anticipate “meaningful absolute power sector emission reduction” in this decade, it says. That appears to be the first time China has agreed to specific emissions targets in any part of its economy.
The agreement comes two weeks before representatives from nearly 200 countries converge in Dubai as part of the United Nations climate talks known as COP28. The United States and China have an outsize role to play there as nations debate whether to phase out fossil fuel.
“This lays the foundation for the negotiations in Dubai,” said David Sandalow, a veteran of the Clinton and Obama administrations who is now a fellow at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy. “It sends a strong signal to other countries that this language works, and more broadly that differences can be overcome.”
The agreement does not specify how China will push fossil fuels off its electricity grid. While the United States has displaced some of its fossil fuels by increasing solar and wind power, China has been building more renewable energy than any other country but at the same time has also been constructing new coal-fired power plants.
Still, many of those Chinese coal-fired plants are expected to operate at less than full capacity and the International Energy Agency predicted last month that China’s use of coal will drop in the next several years, and possibly as soon as next year.
An analysis by CarbonBrief, a United Kingdom-based energy publication, found that China’s emissions are likely to fall next year, after they had rebounded from a decline because of coronavirus restrictions. That is in part because of “record installations of low-carbon electricity” that the analysis found could be enough to meet rising electricity demand.
Mr. Sandalow said displacing fossil fuels as described in the U.S.-China agreement would allow the countries to share knowledge as they both work to add more renewable power to their electric grids and invest in energy storage and better transmission.