As disasters spike, superpowers face mounting calls to forge climate deal

Leaders of some of the world’s top climate institutions are ratcheting up pressure on the United States and China to forge an agreement on confronting global warming, fearing that the strained relations of these two superpowers could derail progress at international negotiations in Dubai.

With just two months left before the annual U.N. Climate Change Conference, also known as COP28, leaders from the United Nations, the International Energy Agency and the climate summit itself are pushing for the two superpowers to strike a deal. They see U.S.-China collaboration as key to jump-starting the international community’s lagging effort to limit rising world temperatures, which scientists say are contributing to more deadly fires, floods and storms.

“Such a signal from COP28 would (add) major momentum to our fight against climate change,” IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol said in an interview Friday. “I don’t know how likely it is to see an agreement between China and the United States. … But I know that it is very unlikely we reach our climate targets in the absence of that.”

China ranks as the world’s largest emitter of carbon dioxide, releasing roughly 12.7 billion metric tons each year, more than twice that of the United States. But because of its earlier industrialization, the U.S. bears more global responsibility for total carbon emissions, which linger in the atmosphere for decades. Americans also generate more emissions per person than their Chinese counterparts, according to a number of analysts.

Last week’s U.N. General Assembly meetings brought hundreds of climate diplomats to the United States, many of them fretting that widespread geopolitical friction and a lack of progress on financing are imperiling COP28. Scheduled for December in Dubai, this year’s summit aims to complete the global “stocktake,” a formal assessment of the world’s progress toward the goals of the 2015 Paris agreement and whether stronger measures are needed to meet those targets.

A draft version of the assessment released this month found governments far off track, with “a rapidly narrowing window” for them to catch up. Because the United States and China are the world’s biggest emitters, only major steps forward from the two countries in collaboration can lead to success, Birol and others said this week.

U.S.-China relations

Yet relations between Beijing and Washington remain frosty over trade, technology, human rights and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The tensions have undermined climate talks between the two countries — at one time a rare bright spot in their dealings.

The friction was evident in July when U.S. climate envoy John F. Kerry visited Beijing and Chinese leader Xi Jinping didn’t meet with him. During the visit, Xi delivered a speech saying China’s pace on reducing greenhouse gas emissions “should and must be” determined without outside interference.

In New York on Wednesday, U.N. Secretary General António Guterres convened a summit on climate change without granting either nation a speaking slot. He advertised it as a “no nonsense” summit intended to feature new and ambitious efforts, and he did not hide his frustrations over how industrialized nations are responding.

“Humanity has opened the gates of hell,” Guterres said to open the event. “We must make up time lost to foot-dragging, arm-twisting and the naked greed of entrenched interests raking in billions from fossil fuels.”

Deals between the United States and China have helped galvanize major climate pacts before. Their work ushered in the Paris agreement in 2015, and as recently as two years ago in Glasgow, Scotland, the two nations made a surprise announcement to accelerate their work together on clean energy. Last year, amid broader friction, the best the two countries could do was agree to resume formal negotiations, ending a three-month freeze.

“We need to go beyond that” at COP28, said Adnan Amin, who serves as chief executive of the summit and has been seeking to broker an agreement between the two nations. Amin, who previously headed the International Renewable Energy Agency, spent last week meeting with U.S. officials in New York and was planning to spend this week visiting China.

The most promising opportunities involve technology China could adopt to contain various greenhouse gases, especially methane emissions from agriculture, Amin said.

China’s climate envoy, Xie Zhenhua, said last year that his country would work to reduce methane emissions, but Beijing has not signed a Global Methane Pledge that the United States and other nations have supported.

Amin said the two countries could work together on heavy industry — including steel, cement and aluminum plants, which have emissions that can be difficult to control.

Tensions

Broader deals, especially to send Chinese clean-energy technology to the United States, are politically unpalatable for President Biden while anti-China sentiment is widespread among both parties in Washington. The Biden administration has accused Beijing of genocide and forced labor in the western Chinese region of Xinjiang and placed a ban on products made there, including solar panels.

Amin said coal is also likely to be a big sticking point. China has infuriated Western officials by increasing its construction of coal-fired power plants again.

It is not running the new plants all out, Amin said China has told his team, leaving them to conclude they may be just a contingency in case the country needs more domestic energy supply. Beijing has made a priority of energy security since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last year, which sent energy markets into turmoil and led Western countries to target Russia’s lucrative energy export business.

Kerry and Birol wrote an op-ed in The Washington Post last week imploring the world to stop building coal-fired power plants without technology to limit their emissions. The world’s existing coal-burning plants are enough, if left unchecked, to keep the world from fulfilling the Paris agreement, they wrote.

In an interview in New York, Kerry said he wants to get more world leaders to act urgently on emissions, and he expressed frustration over Asia. He said China is responsible for about 350 of 500 gigawatts of new coal-fired power capacity coming online there.

“Those 500 gigawatts could wipe out all the gains of Europe and the United States,” Kerry said. “That’s neither fair, nor is it sensible.”

Birol recently provided a preview of the IEA’s World Energy Outlook report, saying total oil, gas and coal demand will peak this decade, the “beginning of the end” of fossil fuels. While China may be building more coal-fired power than expected, it is also adopting solar power and electric vehicles much faster than expected, reasons to think its fossil fuel demand will also peak, Birol told The Post.

But even that progress cannot reduce emissions enough to limit temperature increases to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, the Paris agreement’s goal, Birol said. At COP28, the United States and China must devote “high-level” attention to new ways to further accelerate the transition to cleaner energy, he said.

“Without international collaboration, it will take several decades, and it will (be) much more costly,” he said. “And the nerve center of the international collaboration is whether or not the U.S. and China work together.”