Written by Valerie Volkovici, Timothy Gardner, and Kate Abnett
BEIJING (Reuters) – As China and the United States meet this week in Beijing, the world’s two biggest carbon emitters will be looking for ways to cooperate on both domestic policy and international trade to cut greenhouse gas emissions as they try to reset relations amid. Disagreements over trade and security.
Climate cooperation between the world’s two largest economies is essential to the world’s efforts to keep global warming to within 1.5°C above pre-industrial temperatures. Previous agreements have also encouraged other countries to set bolder targets.
Here are some of the key areas for discussion this week:
climate finance
Earlier this month, the United States and China began discussing climate finance, which richer countries offer poorer countries to transition to clean energy and climate adaptation, as an area of potential cooperation.
The arrangement, which was first agreed upon at the United Nations climate talks in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, is based on the idea that rich countries have a greater responsibility to deal with climate change because they have contributed the bulk of greenhouse emissions to the atmosphere since The Industrial Revolution.
However, China’s rapid growth and increasing emissions have led many – including the European Union – to argue that China should also contribute aid. Earlier this month, US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said contributions from Beijing could boost UN climate funds.
Beijing has rejected these calls, and referred to its classification as a “developing country” under the 1992 agreement. It has resisted suggestions to reconsider these classifications, accusing the West of trying to shirk its historical responsibility for climate change.
However, he has indicated his willingness to provide climate finance to developing countries through various instruments, such as the South-South Climate Cooperation Fund which he launched in 2015. However, this fund has provided only 10% of the $3.1 billion pledged. It does, according to think tank E3G.
methane cooperation
Climate experts hope to see progress in tackling methane – a powerful greenhouse gas emitted by energy, agriculture and waste responsible for nearly 30% of global warming.
The two have agreed in the past to work on measuring methane emissions, and will likely look to expand that collaboration.
Technological advances in methane detection, including the deployment of satellites, present a potential opportunity for the United States to cooperate with China. The United States hopes China will reveal its domestic plans to tackle the issue before the next United Nations climate conference in December.
solar tariff
US tariffs on Chinese solar panels have been a sore point since former President Donald Trump’s administration imposed them in 2018, arguing that low-cost Chinese products hurt local manufacturers.
It was escalated after the passage of the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act, which aims to rapidly expand renewable energy in the United States and rehabilitate the clean energy industry.
President Joe Biden has paused the tariffs, and vetoed an effort to eliminate exemptions on them. But he also withheld more than 1,000 shipments of slabs from Xinjiang over concerns about slave labour.
Beijing says the tariffs are hampering the global transition to clean energy and should be removed. She argues that if the US wants to “fence off” climate from broader diplomatic disputes, it should also refrain from unfairly politicizing China’s solar panel production, which is hindering the global energy transition.
The complex issue is not expected to be addressed in the talks but could loom over discussions.
coal
While the US special envoy on climate change, John Kerry, praised China’s rapid deployment of renewable energy in his opening remarks on Monday, he suggested that its continued construction of coal plants could undermine that progress.
China has pledged to start reducing coal consumption, but not until 2026, and new approvals for coal power project have accelerated since last year.
China continues to justify its use of coal as an issue of economic security. Meanwhile, the United States is the world’s largest producer of oil and gas and its fossil fuel exports have boomed.
batteries
China’s dominance of the electric car battery supply chain has been another sore point in relations as Kerry meets his counterpart Xie Zhenhua and other senior government officials during his three-day visit to Beijing this week.
Chinese officials worry that Washington may widen restrictions on battery imports, after the US in May revoked a grant to Microvast Holdings when lawmakers expressed concerns about its alleged links to the Chinese government.
Aside from the battery trade, Kerry and Xie can talk about ways countries can exchange knowledge about battery technologies.
1.5 degrees
Under the 2015 Paris Agreement, countries agreed to work towards keeping global warming to “well below 2°C” – ideally within 1.5°C – of pre-industrial temperatures. The United Nations Climate Summit six years later in Glasgow set 1.5°C as the global target. Global emissions levels have risen since then.
China still points to the Paris Agreement’s two-degree language, while the United States, the European Union, and many countries vulnerable to climate change focus on the 1.5°C target. As the two countries look forward to the COP28 conference in Dubai, the lack of alignment of temperature targets is likely to be a point of contention, especially since the countries are expected to step up efforts to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions.
China, with a population of 1.4 billion, describes its emissions output in per capita terms, making a more appropriate comparison with US emissions for a population of 330 million.
The United States tends to look at total national emissions, ignoring both historical emissions and the per capita breakdown.