Here we go again. I wrote pretty much the same piece back in April, but several months later, John Kerry is still hard at work extracting promises from China when it comes to cutting emissions. He's even willing to put aside the need to address human rights abuse--which amount to genocide against Uyghur Muslims--to do so.
Eva Dou's report for The Washington Post pretty much tells us everything we need to know. Emphasis is mine:
There was no immediate indication that Beijing would agree to speed up its timeline for reducing emissions. China is the world’s largest carbon emitter, followed by the United States, and Kerry has been hoping to get Beijing’s cooperation ahead of a United Nations climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland, in November. Kerry said in a telephone interview from an airport in South Korea that Chinese officials are finalizing a “comprehensive” plan for curbing emissions in the country, even as Beijing pushed for the United States to lift sanctions on solar panel makers in exchange for greater cooperation on climate change.
“We made some progress. That’s the bottom line,” he said after several days of meetings in the northern Chinese city of Tianjin. “In diplomacy, you don’t always get everything you want in one fell swoop.”
Instead, China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi demanded that Washington first address its “two lists” — a sprawling account of grievances that included sanctions on Chinese officials and U.S. extradition efforts against Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou — according to a summary published by the Chinese Foreign Ministry on Wednesday.
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In writing for The Washington Examiner, Joel Gehrke references Dou's report, as well as reporting from other outlets. But, his headline is undoubtedly more accurate than most. "John Kerry echoes China’s argument that human rights sanctions threaten climate talks," it reads.
Dou's headline meanwhile reads that "Kerry urges China to cut emissions faster, as Beijing seeks easing of solar sanctions."
As I said, I wrote about this already in April. I cited Steven Lee Myers' report for The New York Times. Here's what he wrote:
“It’s very important for us to try to keep those other things away, because climate is a life-or-death issue in so many different parts of the world,” Mr. Kerry said in an interview on Sunday morning in Seoul, where he met with South Korean officials to discuss global warming. “What we need to do is prove we can actually get together, sit down and work on some things constructively.”
...
Mr. Kerry met in Shanghai with his Chinese counterpart, Xie Zhenhua, over three days, in talks that at one point went late into the night. Mr. Kerry said they stayed focused on climate change and did not touch on increasingly rancorous disputes over issues like China’s political crackdown in Hong Kong and its threats toward Taiwan.
China is almost certainly lauding how much they can take advantage of us. And for what benefit to us? As I highlighted, Dou wrote about there's "no immediate indication that Beijing would agree to speed up its timeline for reducing emissions."
The Biden administration makes it no secret that one of their top priorities, if not the top, is what they warn is a "climate crisis."
President Joe Biden has bragged about his close relationship with Xi Jinping, which ought to put him in an even greater position to emphasize China's human rights abuses will not be tolerated.
Instead, China is using our own talking points against us, such as concerns brought up by our UN Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield, to the president himself, that the United States is supposedly a racist country.
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