Biden Deploys John Kerry to China for Climate Talks amid Afghanistan Disaster

President Joe Biden dispatched “climate envoy” and former Secretary of State John Kerry to China for a global warming summit amid the ongoing disaster his Afghanistan withdrawal.

Kerry will meet with Chinese climate official Xie Zhenhua in Tianjin through Friday, following up on a meeting the two held in Shanghai in April. The Chinese Foreign Ministry confirmed Wednesday Kerry arrived in Tianjin and talks were underway.

The South China Morning Post (SCMP) described climate change as “one of the few areas” where the U.S. and China are “working together.” 

In reality, China is gleefully littering the Third World with carbon-spewing coal power plants and now single-handedly responsible for more than half of the world’s coal-fired power. China is already working on building new coal-fired power plants in Afghanistan to enrich the new Taliban regime, which is not noted for its environmental sensitivity. China’s latest five-year economic plan, published in March, made no serious concessions to climate change:

Forbes pointed out in August that China’s mania for dirty power looks like a deliberate mockery of the climate change movement since it is building far more domestic coal power than it actually needs and even chooses coal in situations where cleaner energy sources might make more sense.

“China’s massive existing coal fleet can generate more than a trillion watts of power, roughly enough to power the United States’ entire electricity grid, but that power comes at a massive cost to the climate,” Forbes noted. “Coal-fired power plants in China make up more than half of all global coal generation, and contribute 14% of global power sector carbon emissions, which is itself the single largest sectoral contributor to climate change.”

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) does not appear to have any intention of compromising its industrial goals to placate climate activists, but it regularly sends bureaucrats to talk about an obsession that could lead its rivals in the United States and Europe to further hobble their own economies.

From the SCMP report:

In Tianjin, both sides will seek to build on their commitment made in Shanghai to work together to implement the Paris Agreement and develop long-term strategies for carbon neutrality by late October, when the UN’s climate change conference, COP26, will begin in Glasgow, the US State Department said on Monday. China’s environment ministry said they would discuss climate cooperation and exchange views on COP26.

The talks come as the US has urged China to take more climate action ahead of the UN conference, which has set critical goals for countries to work more aggressively to halve emissions over the next decade and reach net-zero carbon emissions to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. A devastating UN report earlier this month warned that more immediate and ambitious climate action was needed, in a “code red for humanity.”

The SCMP quoted Chinese officials hinting they might be willing to trim their world’s-worst polluting habits a little in exchange for hefty political and economic concessions from the United States:

Kerry’s trip comes after US deputy secretary of state Wendy Sherman’s trip to Tianjin in July, when senior Chinese officials presented the US with lists of explicit demands to reverse course on the increasingly strained relationship, including to drop an extradition request for Chinese tech executive Meng Wanzhou and to end visa restrictions for Communist Party members.

Foreign Minister Wang Yi reiterated those demands over the weekend during a phone call with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Afghanistan, saying that Beijing would “consider how to engage with the United States based on its attitude towards China”.

Wang repeated his demands on Wednesday while Kerry was in Tianjin, insisting the U.S. must “stop regarding China as a threat and adversary” if it wants help on climate change, which Wang said “cannot possibly be divorced” from other issues.

“The U.S. side hopes that climate cooperation can be an ‘oasis’ in China-U.S. relations, but if that ‘oasis’ is surrounded by desert, it will also become desertified sooner or later,” Wang intoned.

Chinese state media have strongly hinted the path out of that desert would begin with the United States dropping all investigations into the origins of the Wuhan coronavirus and publicly accepting China’s fraudulent narrative of the pandemic. Communist officials and media organs inject their outrage over the coronavirus investigation into virtually every issue, most recently including the debacle in Afghanistan.