Kerry will travel to China and Japan to negotiate on climate action next week – Boston News, Weather, Sports

(CNN) – U.S. Climate Ambassador John Kerry will travel to China and Japan next week to meet with climate leaders ahead of a major United Nations climate change conference in Glasgow in November.

Kerry will be in Japan August 31, then China September 1-3, according to a person familiar with the plans.

This is Kerry’s second trip to China, where he is expected to continue talks with his Chinese counterpart Xie Zhenhua and seek to convince officials there to speed up their schedule of decarbonizing their economies and moving away from coal.

Kerry will meet separately with Japan’s Environment Minister Shinjirō Koizumi to discuss areas of cooperation between the two countries.

China poses one of the biggest challenges for Kerry on his way to Glasgow. China, the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases, has committed to moving to net-zero emissions by 2060 but does not plan to hit peak emissions before 2030. China’s decarbonization target for 2060 is a decade behind those of the US and the European Union.

“None of this works without China really getting going, and China is not turning up right now, and that’s a big problem,” former US climate envoy Todd Stern, who served in the Obama administration, told CNN. “They said they would peak before 2030. That’s kind of a little beer compared to what is needed.”

The US is the second largest emitter of greenhouse gases, and Kerry has made it clear that rapid decarbonization in both countries is the only way to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial temperatures and avert the worst effects of global warming .

President Joe Biden has also expressed his desire to outperform China on clean energy and electric vehicles.

“On the climate front, working together is the only way to break away from the world’s current mutual suicide pact,” Kerry said in a July speech in London. “President Biden and President Xi have both made it clear that they will work together despite other impact differences on climate. America needs China to cut emissions. China needs America to do the same. “

While Kerry has a good working relationship with Zhenhua, who was also China’s lead climate chief during the 2015 Paris Agreement negotiations, the general relationship between the two countries has deteriorated on issues such as trade and China’s human rights abuses.

One of Kerry’s top MPs recently told lawmakers that the special envoy’s climate diplomacy with China has largely focused on areas of cooperation.

“We’re looking for those where the US and China don’t compete in the same way because we don’t see this going to work out well for both of us,” said Kerry’s senior advisor, Dr. Jonathan Pershing told the legislature at a July hearing. “I don’t think we want to be in a position where we’re losing our technological edge or giving up commercial opportunities – that didn’t go well. At the same time, there are clearly areas of good practice that we could share. “

Pershing said climate talks with China also avoided issues such as human rights abuses, including a worrying report that solar cell production in the country’s Xinjiang region is being built using Uyghur forced labor.

Pershing told lawmakers that the climate and China’s human rights abuses are “things we can distinguish and things that we can separate from each other.”

The CNN Wire
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