President Biden’s climate envoy John Kerry’s recent visit to China was met with a low-profile reception and criticism that the climate talks between the two sides were uninspired. An April 19 Wall Street Journal editorial questioned Kerry’s kowtowing to the Chinese Communist Party in return for empty promises.
The editorial said Biden’s climate envoy and Xie Zhenhua issued a joint statement after two days of meetings, but there was little new. The two sides said they are “committed to working with each other and with other countries to address the climate crisis.” The two countries will work to “strengthen the implementation of the Paris Agreement” to limit carbon emissions. Kerry did not make any big concessions to Beijing, and Beijing did not make any new commitments to reduce emissions.
In a sense, this is a relief for U.S.-China relations. But all those empty promises did not come without a price. Making climate the sole focus of the early visit tells the Chinese side that the United States views climate issues as the top of the U.S.-China relationship. And for the Chinese side, he would be happy to discuss climate with the United States without talking about Taiwan, Hong Kong, Beijing’s crackdown on the Xinjiang Uighurs, the South China Sea, North Korea or intellectual property theft.
But Beijing is well aware that it will ignore any carbon commitments that might affect China’s economic growth. Vice Foreign Minister Le Yucheng said last week, “Some countries are asking China to do more on climate change, and I’m afraid that’s not very realistic.”
Rather than inspire Beijing to rethink, Kerry gave Communist Party leaders a chance to conduct a public relations offensive in Shanghai. Chinese Vice Premier Han Zheng welcomed Washington’s return to the agreement that Trump withdrew from, “The Chinese Communist Party welcomes the U.S. return to the Paris agreement and expects the U.S. side to support the agreement.” Kerry also invited Xi to attend the network’s global climate summit later this week.
Meanwhile, Kerry sounded like he was giving his blessing to the CCP’s green industrial policy ambitions, including a commitment in the joint statement to pursue “policies, measures and technologies that decarbonize industry and electricity. For the CCP, this means industrial development rather than green policy. In future discussions about trade distortions or subsidies, Chinese officials will invoke this description. Kerry, however, is telling the Chinese that everything is fine as long as they support green energy in the United States.
Beijing’s hyperbole about the Paris Agreement has been particularly rich. In the years since the Trump administration withdrew from the agreement in 2017, U.S. carbon emissions have been declining, reaching their lowest level since 1992 and their lowest per capita level since 1950 in 2019, thanks in large part to drilling for natural oil shale.
During the same period, China’s emissions are growing dramatically and will only begin to be reduced in 2030. As a February Reuters news story noted, “China last year approved the construction of another 36.9 gigawatts of coal-fired power plants, three times as many as a year ago, bringing the total installed capacity under construction to 88.1 gigawatts. It is now developing 247 GW of coal-fired power, enough to power all of Germany.”
Communist leaders are unconcerned about the Paris agreement because they know it is not binding on them, but will damage the economies of Western countries. The Chinese must be incredulous that the current U.S. administration is wiping out the booming shale gas economy, because it both lowers energy prices and makes the U.S. less dependent on foreign oil.
The failure to reach any new agreement (for the Chinese Communist Party) is a good thing, because it would impose restrictions on the U.S. but not on China.
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