Xi Jinping can combat the world’s single greatest threat – if he walks the talk on carbon neutrality

As a major global investor, I carefully watched how the United Nations General Assembly presidential speeches by Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro and then US President Donald Trump were suddenly upstaged by Chinese President Xi Jinping’s contrasting tone of hope as he pledged to cut carbon emissions.

Faced with our greatest single global threat, man-made climate change, Xi has much more power to change the future than Trump, who claimed China invented global warming and promised to bring back coal but instead oversaw a national coal industry collapse at a faster rate than his predecessor Barack Obama.

While the world media’s attention is firmly focused on the US presidential election, this is a critical period for China as it develops its 14th five-year plan, to be announced at the National People’s Congress in March 2021.

The global implications of this plan are hard to exaggerate. The main question is whether Xi will use the plan to stand up to the Chinese power industry and provinces to stop the flood of new coal being approved as the central government relaxes restrictions. You cannot cut carbon emissions and also build coal.