POLITICS Bloomberg Businessweek March 8, 202140
TIFFANYHAGLER-GEARD/BLOOMBERG;DATA:COMPILEDBYBLOOMBERGTHE BOTTOM LINE The White House aims to separate climate
diplomacy from otherwise fraught U.S.-China relations. That will be
tough, but not impossible, especially if it works with allies. Annual global carbon
dioxide emissions, tons
U.S.
China
Other30b150
1969 2019November, he may find that getting on the same
page with China will be harder. U.S.-China relations
on climate matter not only because the two coun-
tries account for just less than half of the world’s
emissions, but also because what they do sends a
signal to the rest of the world.
Biden administration officials—climate envoy
John Kerry and Secretary of State Antony Blinken
among them—have signaled they want to shield cli-
mate diplomacy from the more turbulent aspects
of the bilateral relationship. But experts and gov-
ernment officials worry that tensions on every-
thing including Taiwan and Hong Kong could
undermine those discussions. “We’re in a diffi-
cult place, and yet we have this inescapable real-
ity that we can’t address the global challenge of
climate change without coordination between the
U.S. and China,” says Kelly Sims Gallagher, who
oversaw Chinese climate diplomacy in the Obama
White House.
Climate diplomacy doesn’t exist in a vacuum.
China has already expressed caution about coop-
eration with the Biden administration as long as
the state of relations between the two countries
remains strained. And Kerry has pushed back
against accusations that he will urge the adminis-
tration to go soft on China because of his climate
goals. “Obviously we have serious differences with
China, on some very, very important issues,” Kerry
said during a White House briefing in late January.
Issues such as intellectual property theft and the
South China Sea “will never be traded for any-
thing that has to do with climate. That’s not going
to happen. But climate is a critical standalone issue
that we have to deal on.” In a speech on March 2,
Kerry again said, “We can deal with this as a com-
partmentalized issue,” and that the climate crisis
can’t “fall victim to ... other concerns and contests”
between the nations.
Kerry has made clear he’d like to see China step
up its commitment to cutting emissions before the
26th United Nations Climate Change Conference in
Glasgow (COP26) in November. The U.S. is expected
to soon make its own ambitious pledge, but Kerry
wants China and other big emitters such as India
to increase their carbon-reduction pledges for 2030
rather than dangling longer-term pledges about car-
bon neutrality by midcentury. He’s also criticized
China’s current plan to end carbon emissions by
2060, a full 10 years later than many other coun-
tries. “What steps will we take in the next 10 years?”
he said during a press event on Feb. 19 marking U.S.
reentry into the Paris accord. “China, which is the
largest emitter in the world, needs to be part of the
2020 to 2030 effort.”Beijing is sending signals that it’s serious about
climate diplomacy. The reappointment of veteran
negotiator Xie Zhenhua—a key architect of the Paris
agreement—was seen as a good start by climate
experts in the U.S. Xie joined Kerry at a UN Security
Council meeting on climate in February, where he
touted China’s progress toward peaking emissions
by 2030, while calling climate change a “pressing
and serious threat to the survival, development,
and security of humankind.”
David Waskow, director of the international cli-
mate initiative at the World Resources Institute
(WRI), a global environmental nonprofit group,
says Xie has “been around a long time, and has a
good relationship with Kerry,” though “we should
not expect the relationship on climate between the
U.S. and China to easily snap back to what it was
like in 2015. But climate may be the one area where
the two countries can work well together.”
The path to Beijing may run through Canada,
Europe, and the U.K. this time around.
After Biden met virtually with Canadian
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Feb. 23,
Trudeau told Bloomberg News that the countries
planned to work together to push high-emitting
countries. Canada’s Environment Minister
Jonathan Wilkinson cited China as well as
Australia, India, Japan, and Mexico as countries
that should face pressure. If the U.S. coordinates
with Canada and other allies before COP26, they
could negotiate with China as a group, from a posi-
tion of strength.
The U.S. is expected to set out its national plan
to help limit global warming before an April 22 cli-
mate summit Biden has called with world leaders.
Kerry has signaled that the U.S. wants to go big, and
WRI and other environmental groups are pushing
for a U.S. commitment to reduce greenhouse gas
emissions by as much as 50% over the next decade
from 2005 levels. That would be more aggressive
than the Obama administration’s 2015 pledge to cut
emissions by 26% to 28% by 2025.
Even if China and the U.S. struggle to find com-
mon ground, progress is still possible. These days
both governments understand that the race to
dominate in clean energy is paramount to their
economies. “Neither China nor the U.S. wants to
lose out when it comes to the industries of tomor-
row,” says Alex Wang, an expert on environmental
law and the law and politics of China at the UCLA
School of Law. —David Wainer and Will Wade, with
Nick Wadhams and Kait Bolongaro○ Xie