President Xi Jinping announced Tuesday that China will seek to achieve carbon neutrality by 2060, the first such commitment from the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases.
Xi, addressing the United Nations General Assembly, also pledged that China would ensure that its emissions peak before 2030 and challenged other countries to pursue a “green” recovery in response to the coronavirus pandemic.
“We call on all countries to pursue innovative, coordinated, green, and open development for all, seize the historic opportunities presented by the new round of scientific and technological revolution and industrial transformation, achieve a green recovery of the world economy in the post-COVID era, and thus create a powerful force driving sustainable development,” Xi said.
Xi’s speech came after President Trump, in his own prerecorded address to the U.N., attacked China’s environmental policies.
“Those who attack America’s exceptional environmental record while ignoring China’s rampant pollution are not interested in the environment,” Trump said. “They only want to punish America, and I will not stand for it.”
Trump has tried to play up his environmental record in the months before the election, but he has ignored climate change. Early in his presidency, he rejected the Paris climate agreement, arguing the United States promised too much compared to other large emitters such as China.
The U.S., the world’s second-largest emitter, remains far away from reaching its Paris target of reducing emissions 26% to 28% below 2005 levels by 2025, even before Trump is able to leave the Paris agreement officially in November, after the election.
Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden has pledged to rejoin the Paris agreement and achieve net-zero emissions in the U.S. by 2050.
Nat Keohane, senior vice president at the Environmental Defense Fund, said China’s new commitment for carbon neutrality by 2060, if fulfilled, would amount to a “game changer.”
The country is already the world’s largest producer of wind and solar, along with electric vehicles, but China is home to more than half of the globe’s operating coal plants, and it is bankrolling fossil fuel projects abroad through its Belt and Road Initiative.
“If China were to actually get on that path, that would be incredibly ambitious and hugely important,” Keohane told the Washington Examiner. “The proof is in the pudding, but I don’t want to dismiss this, and I don’t think anybody would say that it’s not ambitious.”
