US climate envoy John Kerry urges China to cut more emissions by 2030

Diplomat says he’s hopeful Xi Jinping ‘will make the decision that they could move further’ in the next decade

Chinese president has vowed the nation will not build new coal-fired power plants abroad but did not commit to curb reliance on the fossil fuel

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US special envoy on climate John Kerry called it a “critical decade” for keeping global warming in check. Photo: Bloomberg

Published: 1:57pm, 30 Sep 2021Updated: 1:56pm, 30 Sep 2021

The top US climate diplomat encouraged China to move more aggressively to slash greenhouse gas emissions before 2030, calling this a “critical decade” for keeping global warming in check.

“We hope we can find more common ground for moving the process forward, and we’re looking at a number of different ways in which we might be able to do that,” US special envoy on climate John Kerry said in an interview taped on Wednesday with Bloomberg Television.

Kerry added he was hopeful “that President Xi will make the decision that they could move further with respect to the reduction of emissions during the course of the next 10 years”.

President Xi Jinping last week pledged that China, the world’s top greenhouse gas emitter, would stop building new coal-fired power plants outside the country but did not commit to curtail its own reliance on the fossil fuel. The US and China are set to discuss the issue ahead of a pivotal United Nations climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland in four weeks.

China is still heavily reliant on coal-fired power. Photo: Reuters

China’s autonomy on the issue could be critical to making progress. Although Kerry and his Chinese counterpart, Xie Zhenhua, have spent months in talks, the country has sought to make recent climate commitments – such as Xi’s coal pronouncement at the UN General Assembly meeting last week – independent of the US.