Climate Change Cooperation Cannot be an “Oasis” in U.S.-China Relations, Kerry Told
Analysis by Michael Klare, Sane Committee Co-Founder, Sept. 14, 2021
President Biden’s special envoy on climate change, former Secretary of State John Kerry, traveled to Tianjin, China on August. 31 and Sept. 1 to meet with Chinese officials on joint efforts to slow the pace of global warming. While in Tianjin, Kerry met with his Chinese counterpart, Xie Zhenhua, and spoke by videoconference with Foreign Minister Wang Yi. Both sides reported that the talks produced agreement on some issues but also strayed into larger themes in U.S.-China relations, where discord prevailed.
According to the Chinese Embassy’s official “readout” of the Wang-Kerry conversation, held on Sept. 1, Wang told Kerry that “China-U.S. cooperation on climate change not only serves the interests of both sides, but also benefits all mankind.” Kerry, in remarks to reporters that same day, said that he’d had constructive talks with his Chinese counterparts, and announced that he would meet with Xie once again prior to the UN’s Glasgow Climate Change Conference in early November.
However, aside from these few positive comments, the exchanges between Kerry and Chinese officials were largely rancorous. Wang insisted that while cooperation on climate change was important, it could not be separated from the larger fabric of U.S.-China relations, which, he said, were in sharp decline. “In recent years,” he said, “China-U.S. relations have taken a sharp turn for the worse and are facing serious difficulties” – a trend he attributed to increased U.S. hostility toward China. “The United States should stop viewing China as a threat and rival, and cease containing and suppressing China all over the world.”
Teleconference between Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi and U.S. Special Envoy on Climate Change John Kerry, Sept. 1, 2021
Given the downturn in U.S.-China relations and continued U.S. hostility toward China, cooperation on climate change will be hard to achieve, Wang told Kerry. “China-U.S. cooperation on climate change cannot be divorced from the overall situation of China-U.S. relations,” he asserted. “The U.S. side wants the climate change cooperation to be an ‘oasis’ of China-U.S. relations. However, if the oasis is all surrounded by deserts, then sooner or later, the ‘oasis’ will be desertified.”
Kerry, for his part, chastised the Chinese leadership for interjecting other issues into the discussion on climate and criticized China for its continuing reliance on coal. “My response to them,” he told reporters, “was, ‘Hey look, climate is not ideological. It’s not partisan, it’s not a geostrategic weapon or tool, and it’s certainly not day-to-day politics. It’s a global, not bilateral, challenge.’”
Kerry also said he told Chinese leaders that preventing warming from exceeding 1.5 degrees Celsius above the preindustrial average – the point at which scientists say the effects of climate change will be catastrophic and irreversible – will require a dramatic turnaround in China’s consumption of coal, the most carbon-intensive of all fossil fuels.
Speaking of China’s current energy plans, Kerry said he told Chinese leaders, “adding some 200-plus gigawatts of coal over the last five years, and now another 200 or so coming online in the planning stage, if it went to fruition would actually undo the ability of the rest of the world to achieve a limit of 1.5 degrees.”
It would appear, then, that the Biden administration’s effort to promote cooperation with China on climate change is being undermined by its insistence on criticizing China on multiple fronts – human rights, trade, military behavior, coal use, and so on – while also increasing military pressure on the Chinese in the western Pacific. (See the “Provocative Maneuvers” option on the Sane Committee website.) While Kerry and Xie may pull off a face-saving encounter on the eve of the Glasgow meeting, the U.S. and China will not attend that pivotal event as a unified force – dashing hopes for a successful outcome to the conference.