Setting aside their cyber and maritime disputes, President Barack Obama and China’s President Xi Jinping on Saturday sealed their nations’ participation in last year’s Paris climate change agreement.
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“This is not a fight that any one country no matter how powerful can take alone”, Mr. Obama said of the pact.
Xi told Erdogan that he appreciated Ankara’s emphasis that it would not allow its country to take any actions that would affect China’s security.
If the agreement is eventually adopted, he said, “we’ll have a truly global climate agreement that will bind the two biggest emitters in the world”.
“It now looks like the Paris agreement will enter into force before the end of the year and that will really be light speed compared to nearly all other global agreements”, he said.
US President Barack Obama and Chinese President Xi at the West Lake State Guest House in Hangzhou in eastern China’s Zhejiang province Saturday.
The Paris deal is the world’s first comprehensive climate agreement.
China and the USA produce 38 percent of the world’s man-made carbon dioxide emissions. China and the USA sought to spur other countries to join that pact through their example, Deese said.
Obama will be the first US president to visit Laos when he travels to Vientiane for the ASEAN and East Asia summits. However, he cautioned the agreement should be seen as a “starting point, not the finale” of action to tackle climate change.
“Ratifying the agreement accords with China’s policy of actively dealing with climate change”, a proposal on reviewing and ratifying the agreement, approved by Chinese lawmakers, reportedly said.
Chinese President Xi Jinping said that climate change concerns the well-being and future of humanity.
The Paris agreement, sealed last December after two weeks of intense negotiations, needs to be ratified by 55 countries, representing 55% of global emissions, in order to come into effect.
Saturday’s announcement, which POLITICO earlier this week reported was in the works, comes as leaders of the world’s largest economies are arriving in China for the G-20 summit. While the effects of the warming planet are already being felt around the world, experts say that countries must dramatically limit greenhouse gas emissions in the coming decades to prevent disastrous climate change.
The announcement is a major diplomatic achievement for the U.S. president, who ends his term in January.
Before China made this announcement, the 23 nations that had ratified the agreement accounted for just over 1% of emissions.
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The accord reached by almost 200 countries at a United Nations conference on climate change in Paris in December will take effect after it is ratified by at least 55 countries responsible for 55 percent of global emissions. China vowed that its emissions, which are still growing, will top out by 2030. Still, the White House says it is confident the USA can meet its targets through investments in renewable energy and an ongoing shift from coal to cleaner-burning natural gas. “Joint U.S. -Chinese leadership was part of the reason that we were able to get Paris done”.
