Hey, remember when we were being told that everything the U.S. did under China Joe would take ‘climate change’ into account? Well, not so fast
U.S. Wants to Insulate Climate Talks From Tensions With China
In the lead-up to the 2015 Paris climate agreement, then-President Obama flew to Beijing and won a major concession from President Xi Jinping—that China would peak its carbon emissions around 2030. It paved the way for the historic accord.
As President Biden seeks to aim higher before a global climate conference in the U.K. this November, he may find that getting on the same page with China will be harder. U.S.-China relations on climate matter not only because the two countries account for just less than half of the world’s emissions, but also because what they do sends a signal to the rest of the world.
Biden administration officials—climate envoy John Kerry and Secretary of State Antony Blinken among them—have signaled they want to shield climate diplomacy from the more turbulent aspects of the bilateral relationship. But experts and government officials worry that tensions on everything including Taiwan and Hong Kong could undermine those discussions. “We’re in a difficult place, and yet we have this inescapable reality that we can’t address the global challenge of climate change without coordination between the U.S. and China,†says Kelly Sims Gallagher, who oversaw Chinese climate diplomacy in the Obama White House.
Climate diplomacy doesn’t exist in a vacuum. China has already expressed caution about cooperation with the Biden administration as long as the state of relations between the two countries remains strained. And Kerry has pushed back against accusations that he will urge the administration to go soft on China because of his climate goals. “Obviously we have serious differences with China, on some very, very important issues,†Kerry said during a White House briefing in late January. Issues such as intellectual property theft and the South China Sea “will never be traded for anything that has to do with climate. That’s not going to happen. But climate is a critical standalone issue that we have to deal on.†In a speech on March 2, Kerry again said, “We can deal with this as a compartmentalized issue,†and that the climate crisis can’t “fall victim to … other concerns and contests†between the nations.
It’s so darned important that they will sideline it on other things. Of course, Joe is in China’s pocket, so, his admin will tread lightly on things like the massive human rights abuses by China, just like happened under Obama with Joe as VP and Hillary Clinton as Secretary Of State. Heck, China is probably happy to talking about the climate crisis scam, because they know they are only going to pay lip-service to Doing Something. The historic Paris agreement? Most signatory nations don’t even have plans/compliant plans much less actually doing something. China will be nowhere close to doing anything come 2030.
David Waskow, director of the international climate initiative at the World Resources Institute (WRI), a global environmental nonprofit group, says Xie has “been around a long time, and has a good relationship with Kerry,†though “we should not expect the relationship on climate between the U.S. and China to easily snap back to what it was like in 2015. But climate may be the one area where the two countries can work well together.â€
Will the China Joe admin attempt to spend most of it’s time yammering with China on climate, rather than on important issues, essentially kowtowing to China, just like we said would happen? China doesn’t actually need to implement climate crisis (scam) policies to control its citizens, it’s already 100% authoritarian.
