“The ball is in the US field,” said Beijing Foreign Minister Wang Yi during a visit by US climate envoy John Kerry on Thursday. “It is impossible to put China-US cooperation in the climate field above the general environment of US-China relations,” said Wang.
In a video conversation from different rooms, Wang Washington accused Washington of a “major strategic miscalculation towards China”. The US had to stop “seeing China as a threat and an enemy”.
USA accuses China of irresponsibility
At the meeting, Kerry said China was playing a “super critical role” in tackling the climate crisis. The US envoy had already asked China, which is currently the country with the highest CO2 emissions in the world, on the previous leg of his trip to Japan to “take responsibility according to its status”.
Cooperation has already been agreed
US President Joe Biden’s special envoy had already visited China in April. The two countries then declared that they would «work together to tackle the climate crisis».
At the end of July, however, Beijing announced that cooperation with the US on climate issues would depend on whether bilateral relations were overall “healthy”. The US government had recently increasingly criticized China for its handling of human rights and the origins of the corona pandemic.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) presented a report in August according to which global warming could reach 1.5 degrees by 2030. That would be ten years earlier than assumed three years ago.