President Joe Biden’s government envoy for climate affairs, John Kerry, assured Wednesday that the US does not intend to impose any solution to the climate breakdown on China.
Kerry’s remarks came after Chinese President Xi Jinping declared that China would make its own decisions on how to respond to global warming.
In China since Sunday to resume the Sino-US dialogue on climate issues, John Kerry said on Wednesday that he and his team had had “extremely warm and productive meetings” with senior Chinese officials.
During Kerry’s visit to Beijing, Xi delivered a speech on the environment.
“We must make our own decisions about the path, the methods, the pace and the intensity with which we must carry them out. No one can expect to exert any influence on us,” he said, quoted by the official Xinhua news agency.
Questioned about this during a teleconference with journalists, Kerry replied: “We don’t impose anything on anyone. We follow science. There is no politics or ideology in what we do,” he added.
The US envoy met Chinese Premier Li Qiang and his counterpart Xie Zhenhua.
“None of the leaders I met suggested that there was any reason why we shouldn’t coordinate, with mutual respect,” he added.
Climate talks between the US and China had stalled last year after a visit to Taiwan by Nancy Pelosi, then head of the House of Representatives.
According to Kerry, the two parties focused on the best way to ensure that the next, the 28th Conference of the Parties (COP28, in its English name) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC, in its acronym in English), scheduled for December, in Dubai, will be a success.
It was also agreed to focus on accelerating the integration of energy from renewable sources in the energy sector, to reduce emissions linked to carbon, as well as other greenhouse gases, such as methane, he detailed.
Also according to John Kerry, the two parties will work “intensively” on these and other issues in the coming weeks, before meeting again in a few weeks.
