The Cop 26 climate summit was dealt a major blow last night as Beijing pushed back against global warming targets – and Joe Biden blasted the leaders of both China and Russia for failing to attend.
Puncturing what had appeared to be growing momentum at the talks in Glasgow, China’s top climate envoy suggested limiting the temperature rise to 2C could still be the world’s goal, not the more ambitious 1.5C.
Meanwhile President Biden said his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping had made a ‘big mistake’ by not attending the summit – and also criticised the absent Russian leader Vladimir Putin for not doing more to tackle climate change when ‘his tundra’s burning, literally’.
US President Joe Biden stated that it was a mistake for his Chinese counterpart to not show up at Cop 26. He also criticised Vladimir Putin’s absence.
Xi Jinping, the Chinese President, was criticized for not attending the Cop 26 summit. However, Xie Zhenhua, the envoy to China, insisted that the 2C target established in 2015 at Paris Agreement must be up for discussion.
The developments threatened to overshadow Boris Johnson’s insistence that he was ‘cautiously optimistic’ the talks were making a difference.
Using a football match analogy, the Prime Minister said the world had ‘pulled back a goal or perhaps even two’ in the fight against global warming after landmark deals on methane emissions and deforestation.
Beijing’s climate negotiator Xie Zhenhua appeared to undermine hopes of further progress by insisting that the higher of two maximum temperature rises agreed by world leaders in 2015 under the Paris Agreement had to remain up for discussion.
‘If we only focus on 1.5, we are destroying consensus and many countries would demand a reopening of the negotiations,’ he said.
In Paris, countries agreed to limit temperature rises to ‘well below’ 2C and ‘pursue efforts’ to restrict them to 1.5C, compared with pre-industrial times.
Baotou, China’s Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region has a coal-burning powerplant.
Many had hoped that Cop26 would lead the way to more commitments to reach the harder figure. This has been questioned by the absence of the Russian President and the Chinese President from the talks that involved around 120 world leaders.
And addressing the summit last night, Mr Biden said: ‘I think it’s been a big mistake quite frankly, China not showing up.
‘They’ve lost their ability to influence people around the world and all the people here at Cop.’
He added: ‘It’s a gigantic issue and they’ve walked away. How can you do that while still claiming to be able leadership?
‘The same with Putin and Russia. His tundra’s burning, literally.
‘We’ve thrown into jeopardy the prospect that we’re going to be able to keep the temperature rising above 1.5C.’
Mr Johnson had earlier spoken of his optimism after agreements on deforestation, limiting methane and pledges to work towards net zero, and tweeted: ‘Let’s keep 1.5C alive.’
In a stark warning, he said: ‘If we don’t fix our climate, it will be an economic catastrophe as well as an environmental catastrophe. The only way to fix this is to reduce CO2 and tackle climate change.’
He said the British people had a ‘great wisdom’ and were ‘not dumb’ and knew it was a problem that needed to be fixed.
Mr Johnson was also asked about the absence of Xi and Putin but said they had told him it was because of the pandemic and ‘you have got to respect that’.
He added: ‘That doesn’t mean the Chinese are not engaging.’
However, a UK source criticised China, saying ‘we are not seeing the sort of leadership people want to see’ from the world’s biggest emitter.
On November 2, workers sort coal in the vicinity of a coal mine located in Datong (China’s northern Shanxi region).
And Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates, at the conference to support a US campaign to cut carbon emissions, sounded a pessimistic note over the 1.5C target, saying: ‘There’s no comparable feat that mankind has ever achieved.’
He stated that the cost to subsidise countries to reduce emissions would be too high, so richer countries should focus on reducing the cost for green technology.
In an interview with former foreign secretary Jeremy Hunt for the Policy Exchange think tank, Mr Gates said: ‘What happened with solar panels where they were very expensive, and now they’re cheap, or lithium ion batteries – we need to do that for about six other technologies.’