VisitCHN

China and the US will not sign a landmark agreement on climate change policies when Barack Obama visits Beijing next month, the US president’s climate change envoy said yesterday, in spite of high hopes this year among US officials.

Todd Stern said the two governments would seek “a common understanding” on climate change issues ahead of the crucial meeting in Copenhagen in December and would deepen co-operation on clean energy, but would not reach an accord on carbon emissions targets.

The low expectations for the climate change talks might please some European nations, which feared that China and the US would seek to impose a bilateral accord on other countries at Copenhagen. But the fact that no landmark deal will be agreed underlines the weak position of the US in climate change discussions until cap-and-trade legislation is passed by Congress.

“I do not think that we are expecting a broad agreement, per se,” Mr Stern said yesterday at a briefing in Shanghai. “It’s not an issue of trying to cut some separate deal, but there absolutely is an issue of trying to get us and China as aligned as possible so that we have a chance to get an agreement in Copenhagen.”

As the two biggest emitters of carbon, the US and China are central to an eventual new international agreement on global warming. The discussions during Mr Obama’s visit could be a pivotal moment in the climate change debate, potentially setting the tone for the Copenhagen conference.

US officials had high expectations this year about what they could achieve through bilateral talks with China on climate change, hoping to use a broad discussion on environmental issues to nudge China into setting a date for when its carbon emissions will peak.

While China has so far talked about 2050 as a date for peak emissions, some scientists and diplomats say that Chinese emissions need to stop rising by 2025 if global temperatures are not to rise by a dangerous amount.

However, the fact that Congress has yet to approve climate change legislation and is unlikely to do so before the Copenhagen conference has significantly reduced any leverage that the Obama administration might have had over China.

Ming Sung, Asia-Pacific representative of the Clean Air Task Force, a US-based campaign group, said that even without a deal on emissions, the US and China could achieve a lot by agreeing to collaborate more on clean energy demonstration projects, such as for carbon capture and storage and more efficient power grids.

“A lot of these collaborations are already taking place between different companies in the US and China,” he said. “If the governments provide incentives and minimal funding, there will be a big acceleration.”