US climate envoy John Kerry and Xie Zhenhua, China’s representative on climate change have met regularly. Now China has suspended these talks.Cooperation between the United States and China on global warming has been dealt a major blow after China’s foreign ministry suspended climate talks with the United States. The decision came in response to last week’s high-profile trip to Taiwan by Nancy Pelosi, US speaker of the US House of Representatives, which China says violated its sovereignty.
A protracted rift between the two could also threaten the success of discussions at the next round of global climate talks in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, in November. Meetings between the United States and China have been crucial in facilitating multilateral consensus at previous summits, says Fei Teng, a climate-policy researcher at Tsinghua University in Beijing. “I hope that China and the US can resolve this conflict soon and go back to the regular routine.
Some researchers don’t expect the heightened tension to affect climate action. The global nature of the problem means that even if the two countries are not talking, “it is not going to destroy the entire global climate change agenda”, says Sha Yu, an energy researcher at the University of Maryland in College Park. And both countries have been taking steps to fulfil their global commitments.
There are also no signs that other interactions driven by the scientific community will be halted. Fan Dai, director of the California-China Climate Institute at the University of California, Berkeley, which supports joint climate policy research in California and China, says the institute’s work, including on methane-reduction projects involving the state of California and China’s Ministry of Ecology and Environment, will continue.
Yes. The world is at war, and China no longer cares about climate issues. For decades, Chinese carbon pollution was observed from space, as it was released by Chunese industry. Chinese military rehearsals of Taiwan invasion were not 'ecologically motivated.'
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Will a nuclear war affect the climate?