China, US sign emissions plan
Print Edition
A GROUNDBREAKING agreement struck by China and the United States is putting the world’s two worst polluters on a faster track to curbing the heat-trapping gases blamed for global warming.
With the clock ticking on a worldwide climate treaty, the two countries are seeking to put their troubled history as environmental adversaries behind them in the hope that other nations will be spurred to take equally aggressive action.
China agreed for the first time to a self-imposed deadline of 2030 for when its emissions will top out. The US is setting an ambitious new goal to stop pumping as much carbon dioxide into the air.
Yet it wasn’t clear how either the US or China would meet their goals, nor whether China’s growing emissions until 2030 would negate US reductions.
The announcements from Chinese President Xi Jinping and US President Barack Obama unveiled yesterday in Beijing came as Obama’s trip to China was coming to an end.
Obama said the joint announcement on emissions targets was a “historic agreement” and a “major milestone in the US-China relationship.”
Xi said the two had “agreed to make sure that international climate change negotiations will reach an agreement in Paris.”
Environmental advocates hailed it as a “breakthrough,” with the US-based World Resources Institute president Andrew Steer saying: “It’s a new day to have the leaders of the US and China stand shoulder-to-shoulder and make significant commitments to curb their countries’ emissions.”
Under the agreement, Obama set a goal to cut US emissions between 26 and 28 percent by 2025, compared with 2005 levels. Officials have said the US is on track to meet Obama’s earlier goal to lower emissions 17 percent by 2020, and that the revised goal meant the US would be cutting pollution roughly twice as fast during a five-year period starting in 2020.
China, whose emissions are growing as it builds new coal plants, set a target for its emissions to peak by about 2030.
Although that goal still allows China to keep pumping more carbon dioxide for the next 16 years, it marked an unprecedented step for the country.
“China and the United States hope that by announcing these targets now, they can inject momentum into the global climate negotiations and inspire other countries to join in coming forward with ambitious actions as soon as possible,” the announcement said.
The two countries will jointly push international climate change negotiations for the adoption of a protocol at the United Nations Climate Conference in Paris next year, according to the announcement.
China and the US will step up cooperation in the fields of clean energy and environmental protection, the announcement said.
To achieve their climate goals, China and the US will establish a major new carbon storage project based in China through an international public-private consortium led by the two countries to study and monitor carbon storage using industrial CO2, it said.
The two countries will also work together on a new Enhanced Water Recovery project to produce fresh water from CO2 injection into deep saline aquifers.
In addition, China and the US will convene a Climate-Smart/Low-Carbon Cities Summit where leading cities from both countries will share best practices, set new goals and celebrate city-level leadership in reducing carbon emissions and building resilience.
“This is, in my view, the most important bilateral climate announcement ever,” said David Sandalow, a former top environmental official at the White House and the Energy Department.
World leaders pressing for a global climate treaty heralded the deal, with UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon urging all other nations to follow the two countries’ lead by announcing their own emissions targets by early next year.
Former US Vice President Al Gore, a prominent environmentalist, called the Chinese move “a signal of groundbreaking progress.”
Scientists have pointed to the budding climate treaty, intended to be finalized in Paris, as a final opportunity to get emissions in check before the worst effects of climate change become unavoidable. Each nation is supposed to pledge to cut emissions by a specific amount, although negotiators are still haggling over whether these should be binding.
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