Before President Barack Obama and other world leaders arrived in Beijing, environmentalists and others concerned about climate change had reason to be doubtful about the meeting. After all, the Chinese government tried to turn the capital into a giant Potemkin Village: To clean the city’s air pollution in time for the arrival of the VIPs, the government had told residents to get out of town. When that didn’t work and the smog persisted, China started blocking data on air pollution.
Yet following a meeting between Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping, the gathering of leaders for the annual Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Beijing may end up making a much longer lasting contribution to the planet’s health. The presidents announced the world’s two largest economies had reached an agreement on greenhouse-gas emissions, with the U.S. committing to a new, more aggressive target and China promising to begin reducing its carbon emissions. That’s significant because China had been unwilling to make any such promises, arguing that developed countries like the U.S. needed to take the lead. “This is a major milestone in the U.S.-China relationship,” Obama said at a news conference in Beijing.
Some climate-change experts agree that something really significant has just happened in Beijing. The news is “a fantastic development,” says Bradley Opdyke, a researcher and senior lecturer at Australian National University’s Research School of Earth Science. “It’s a real breakthrough.”
The U.S. and China have “been two of the most difficult players in the history of the climate negotiations,” Jake Schmidt, director of international programs for the Natural Resources Defense Council in Washington, D.C., told Bloomberg News, “so the fact that they are coming out and saying they are going to take deep commitments will be a powerful signal to the rest of the world.”
In a way, the promise from Xi just highlights a policy China has already been pursuing. The country, for instance, has been devoting considerable resources to developing wind and solar power and is trying to reduce its reliance on the most polluting types of coal. But while the Chinese had been doing this domestically, they “never explicitly made a commitment before,” according to Opdyke. Now, with China for the first time committing to reducing output of carbon dioxide, other countries that had been reluctant to make any pledges will no longer be able to use Chinese inaction as a convenient excuse. “This,” he says, “cuts them off at the knees.”
China’s willingness to make such a promise is a sign that the government is making progress, notwithstanding the foul air in Beijing and other cities. Otherwise, Xi wouldn’t risk the embarrassment. The Chinese “absolutely will not agree to any targets that they don’t think they can make,” says Roger N. Jones, a professorial research fellow at the Victoria Institute of Strategic Economic Studies at Victoria University in Melbourne. “We can be quite confident that this one is gettable.”
The fact that Xi made the announcement together with Obama is an important sign the two countries are trying to move beyond their disputes over issues like security in the South and East China Seas. While the U.S. and China aren’t on the same page regarding those territorial disputes, they can agree to cooperate on an issue like climate change, says Jeffrey Wilson, a research fellow at the Asia Research Center of Murdoch University in the Western Australia city of Perth. By publicly committing to the policy with Obama, Xi has now made climate-change policy “a centerpiece in the U.S.-China economic relationship.”
Obama’s pledge to cut greenhouse gas emissions at 26 to 28 percent below their levels in 2000 is an improvement over current policy, which has a target of 17 percent below 2005 emissions. But it’s “probably at the bottom end of what the science is saying is required from developed countries,” says Dave Griggs, director of the Monash Sustainability Institute at Monash University in Melbourne. Still, Griggs says, the new target puts the U.S. in the ballpark for the first time.
Moreover, he argues, the Sino-American climate deal should help get other countries on board. “There’s no doubt, with the U.S. and China taking this seriously, it really leaves other countries nowhere to go,” he says. “They either follow suit or appear to be lagging behind.”
