U.S. climate envoy John Kerry faces a daunting task as he seeks to prove the Biden administration can set aside the biggest confrontations with China to cooperate on combating climate change.
China has rejected Kerry’s contention that climate action be treated as a “critical standalone issue” that can be “compartmentalized” as the two countries feud over trade, intellectual property theft, market access, and human rights.
“China-U.S. cooperation in specific areas, unlike flowers that can bloom in a greenhouse despite winter chill, is closely linked with bilateral relations as a whole,” Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian recently said.
Skeptics of Kerry’s single-minded approach argue that climate change naturally intersects with other issues, such as trade. President Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken have repeatedly signaled that former President Donald Trump’s tariffs against China are likely to continue for now, an area of consternation for Beijing.
“The Chinese aren’t going to compartmentalize climate,” said George David Banks, who was an international energy adviser to Trump. “They’ll link it to issues like trade and what they consider to be their internal issues.”
The research group ClearView Energy Partners said in a note Monday that China could potentially “wield concessions on climate as a source of leverage in other negotiations,” an argument recently proffered by Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton.
Bolton, in a Wall-Street Journal op-ed, suggested China could be “stubborn” about bolstering its efforts to address climate change as it holds out for relief from sanctions related to Beijing’s human rights abuses against Uighur Muslims or until the United States acknowledges Chinese sovereignty over the South China Sea.
“Chinese planners are certainly contemplating how to slice and dice their policy choices to achieve … other objectionable goals more subtly,” Bolton said.
Defenders of Kerry’s approach, however, say mitigating climate change is an obvious area of national interest in both countries.
China and the U.S., the world’s top two emitters and largest economies, represent as much as 45% of global emissions.
“The Chinese-U.S. relationship will largely determine the success or failure of climate mitigation globally,” said Paul Bledsoe, who was a climate change adviser to former President Bill Clinton and is now with the Progressive Policy Institute. “Therefore, it has a separate identity apart from purely bilateral grievances.”
Kerry, in a recent appearance on CNN, compared the scenario to President Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev negotiating over nuclear arms in 1986.
“Ronald Reagan, who called the Soviet Union ‘evil empire’ because it was, met with Gorbachev at Reykjavik, and Gorbachev came to the critical decision to stop having 50,000 warheads pointing at each other,” Kerry said.
David Sandalow, a former under secretary of energy in the Obama administration, evoked the same analogy.
“There’s ample precedent for countries cooperating in areas of mutual interest while competing in others,” said Sandalow, who now directs the U.S.-China program for Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy. “The U.S. and Soviet Union worked together on public health and arms control, among other issues, at the height of the Cold War.”
The leaders of both countries have already signaled climate change as a top priority. Biden says he wants the U.S. to reach net-zero emissions across the economy by 2050, meaning any carbon emitted would be balanced with measures that take pollution out of the atmosphere.
China’s Xi Jinping recently pledged that China would reach carbon neutrality by 2060.
Analysts attributed Xi’s surprising carbon neutrality pledge partly as an attempt to mollify Biden ahead of his election win. But China is also motivated to address climate change for its own reasons.
“The truth is neither the U.S. nor China can strong-arm the other on issues of high political importance,” said Li Shuo, senior climate policy officer for Greenpeace East Asia. “This transactional approach misses the drivers of China’s climate action, which are primarily domestic.”
By reducing emissions, China can satisfy a population exposed to heavy air pollution. China is also eager to maintain dominance in manufacturing clean energy technologies and deploying renewables and electric vehicles, areas where Biden aims for the U.S. to close the gap.
“The posture is not so much to sit with your arms folded and wait for the other guy to set a good climate target,” said Paul Bodnar, a managing director at the environmental group RMI who was special assistant to former President Barack Obama and senior director for energy and climate change at the National Security Council. “That’s not the game people are playing anymore. Are you going to own the next generation of global energy markets, or are you not?”
But China’s commitments include plenty of holes, giving Biden and Kerry room to push for more.
In the short term, China has pledged to ensure its emissions peak “before” 2030. But critics say it should be aiming to reduce emissions this decade, not just stop growing them, by reducing its consumption of coal.
China is home to more than half of the globe’s operating coal plants and is still building new ones.
Kerry has promised as part of the Paris Agreement in the coming months to submit a new, more aggressive target on reducing emissions out to 2030, an action that activists say would give the U.S. credibility to push China to do more faster.
“In the coming months, the U.S. should be looking to raise its ambition — this has to start at home,” said Nat Keohane, senior vice president at the Environmental Defense Fund. “If the U.S. comes out with that, it will gain the ability to start pushing other countries to be more ambitious.”
In an early sign pointing to cooperation, China recently appointed Kerry’s old ally, Xie Zhenhua, as special climate envoy. The two negotiated a deal to partner on climate change in 2014, which helped produce the Paris Agreement the following year.
But analysts said China is unlikely to be coaxed to take on another key priority of Biden and Kerry: reforming its Belt and Road initiative, Beijing’s global development program, so that it ends financing of fossil fuel infrastructure projects overseas.
Jane Nakano, senior fellow in the Energy and National Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said cleaning up Belt and Road, unlike reducing emissions at home, wouldn’t directly benefit the Chinese population.
“The Chinese approach to emissions reduction has been practical,” said Nakano. “Beijing will take actions at their own pace, so I don’t see them necessarily going out of their way to make some major concession on the climate side to get something out of it.”
