Climate Special 12: Cooler Relations (II) Artwork

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Climate Special 12: Cooler Relations (II)

June 20, 2025 • NewsChina

Today, we continue our series on China-US climate cooperation with the second half of NewsChina’s interview with Former US Climate Envoy Todd Stern. This time, he explains how cross-cultural friendship helped push the Paris Agreement forward, and he brings us up to date on the Sunnylands Statement that was announced in 2023.

Cooler Relations (II)

Jumping right back into the interview, NC said: You have previously mentioned that the success of the Paris Agreement was built on a memorable and decisive partnership between the US and China. How was that partnership, including personal relationships, fostered to address climate challenges?

TS: I met with Minister Xie all the time, many, many times. I bet we met more than a hundred times. As I said, we’ve gotten to be very good friends. The thing that I regret most of my years in the State Department is that he invited me to come to China and he was going to take me to the Terracotta Warriors. But by then, I did not have enough time to do that. That was a big mistake. I should have done that. We were good friends and we still are good friends.

He once took me to Tianjin, his hometown. I took him to my hometown of Chicago back in the US. He came to my house for dinner one night. I took him to a baseball game in Chicago and I took him to meet the [former] Mayor of Chicago, Rahm Emanuel, who was a friend of mine.

We actually have combined the meetings between countries, with the track-two meetings, and we each invited track-two people from our two countries in separate meetings and meetings together. Of course, we worked very intensively during 2014 in order to bring about the joint announcement, which I have always thought was the single most important event to push [the Paris Agreement] forward.

First of all, [when the joint announcement was made] everybody was shocked because we had really kept [the contact and negotiations between China and the US] secret. They heard about this and they took confidence in the notion that the Paris Agreement could get done. Remember the 195 countries of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change had been trying since 1995 to produce a major agreement that would follow on the very first UNFCCC agreement in 1992. Starting in 1995, countries realized that they needed to have something more specific and concrete, or as we say, flesh on the bones. The framework convention itself could not get jobs done. So, there were various disappointments along the way. Countries were always kind of unsure about [whether or not] the Paris COP21 was going to work. In November 2014, when the two presidents walked together down the aisle in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, the two historic adversaries, two biggest countries in the world, on the developed country side and the developing country side, they stunned the world with their Joint Announcement on Climate Change.

When that happened, there was really a great deal of confidence that it created. By the time countries arrived in Paris, over 180 had put forward their targets or NDCs. All of that was super important. These things don’t happen just because you have a good relationship with somebody. But it helps. The good relationship is not just baseball games, it’s because you understand each other, you try to listen to what each other’s actually saying and you put yourself in the other [person]’s shoes. And you [say], OK, they need this and we need that. Then Minister Xie did the same with respect with our side and trying to understand what we needed. Then we could find a way to bring something that both sides can be comfortable with. That is really hard, particularly for some major issues and problems during climate negotiations. So, I think that we had fundamentally this relationship of trust.

We had very different views on many issues, but we found a way to come together. Obviously,

it’s not just about the US and China. It’s about many countries, small countries, big countries, developed and developing countries. They were all very important. It was not only about the US and China, but it’s also true the relationship between the two is the single most important bilateral relationship.

NC asked: Despite a strained US-China relationship and potential uncertainties in US climate policy, do you believe it’s possible to keep all countries on track with the goals of the Paris Agreement?

TS replied: I think on some levels it’s going to be hard. The question is whether we can have the same kind of working relationship as we had in the past, or even as we had had during the past year between the Biden administration and Xi Jinping administration. That won’t happen because President Trump won’t be interested in it. But the cooperation can happen on a subnational and track-two levels, but not the same as before.

In terms of whether we will be on track for meeting the Paris goals, I think it depends on many things. Nothing is more important than what China does. One of the things that’s important in the Paris Agreement is the system of five-year cycles. Every five years, countries are supposed to ratchet up and put in a new target, and the new target is supposed to be stronger and reflect their “highest ambition.” So, now you are going to have a situation. The Biden team has been working hard on what the new US NDCs would be. [These were unveiled in December 2024, the latest NDC is to reduce net greenhouse gas emissions by 61-66 percent below 2005 levels in 2035.] But now they are not going to be able to do that, as they are not going to be in charge [after] January 20, 2025. So, I think many other countries may also have worked on their quite aggressive and ambitious targets.

In that respect, no country is more important than China, because China accounts at this point for about 30 percent of global emissions. Actually, if you added up all the developing countries in the world, their emissions are lower than the emissions from China at this point. China is also the number-one country in the world on clean energy, solar, wind and batteries and so forth. China has tremendous capacity to really make significant moves. I think a lot of experts around the world would look at what’s needed to keep us on some kind of path, maybe not exactly to net-zero emissions by 2050, and meeting the two [temperature] goals by the Paris Agreement. I think to do that, something strong from China is going to be really important.

Other countries’ new NDCs are also going to be tremendously important: the EU, Canada, Japan, Australia, India and so on. The US is also important. The US I believe will continue reducing emissions because of what is driven by the economics in the US as well as on the subnational level, as well as the IRA.

And lastly, NC asked: Have there been any concrete steps taken toward implementing the US-China Sunnylands Statement since its announcement in late 2023?

TS replied: Among all the many items announced in the Sunnylands Statement, there was actually one very important piece that related to methane. Methane, though not as important as CO2, is very important because it is around 80 times more potent than CO2 and it doesn’t last very long.

If you really reduce methane aggressively, you have an opportunity to hold temperatures down in the short term much more than you otherwise could do. So, the US has worked hard on building a national methane pledge, and also on bilateral projects with China. I don’t have confidence that there is going to be a lot done at the national level by the Trump administration.

There were a couple of pledges at the COP in Dubai [in December 2023] – one from the gas and oil industry and one from the fossil fuel industry, saying they were going to substantially reduce methane [emissions to nearly zero by 2030], but that’s not happening right now. That is something that should happen worldwide and not be dependent on the US alone. I don’t think that China has moved enough on that, but it was an important part of the US-China dialogue in Sunnylands [in 2023].

There was also an agreement or some form of joint action that we set up way back in 2013, but again it’s hard to imagine the US engaging on those kinds of initiatives on a national level. But I think the greatest source of positive energy that can happen between the two countries is going to happen below the national level.

That’s really important and we should keep that activity and commitment together towards all the aspects of climate change, because climate change happens [regardless of] who the leaders are. It doesn’t care if Trump says it’s real or a hoax. It’s not a hoax and it will keep getting worse.

Governments and people can be foolish about it, but it will get worse and worse. Climate change won’t go away unless we deal with it in an effective way. So, I really hope that I will be part of it, that we could maintain and sustain a strong US-China link on climate below the national level. Trump won’t be forever. He was here before for four years. He’s going to be with us now for four years. But four years is not forever, and climate change has to be dealt with. I think joint actions will happen, and I am looking forward to being part of that.

Well, that concludes this week’s podcast on China-US Climate Cooperation. Our theme music is by the famous film score composer Roc Chen. We want to thank out writer Wang Yan, translator Du Guodong, and copy editor Pu Ren. And thank you for listening. We hope you enjoyed it and if you did, please tell a friend, so they too can understand The Context!