Editorial | Climate talks can help warm China-US ties
- Visit by envoy John Kerry offers chance for the world’s two biggest carbon-emitters to steer their relations back towards cooperation
This is a chance for the two biggest carbon-emitters to steer their relations back towards cooperation amid a deep rift most recently exposed during a frosty meeting in Alaska in which barbs were traded between senior US and Chinese officials.
Climate policy may have been only one of many issues between the two sides, but it is one on which they have now said they can work together. In that respect it is symbolically important.
So long as they could not agree on anything much, one of them – in this case the US – had to be seriously out of step on climate change, if not a denier. It was a surreal element of a political and ideological difference that could not stand.
Biden’s prompt decision to rejoin the Paris Agreement and now the summit scheduled for Earth Day has put it behind them.