Climate Commissioner Wopke Hoekstra plans to push Beijing to go beyond its pledge \u2013 unveiled by President Xi Jinping on Wednesday \u2013 to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 7-10% from peak levels by 2035, a target far below what NGOs and analysts hoped for.<\/p>\n
At the UN climate summit in New York yesterday, Commission President Ursula von der Leyen reasserted<\/a> Europe\u2019s commitment to ambitious climate action, despite having presented only a vague statement of intent to world leaders after governments failed<\/a> to agree on a concrete target in time.<\/p>\n Despite the continuing division in Brussels over how much the EU should contribute to the global effort to arrest temperature rise, Hoekstra was quick to question China\u2019s pledge.<\/p>\n \u201cThis level of ambition is clearly disappointing, and given China\u2019s immense footprint, it makes reaching the world\u2019s climate goals significantly more challenging,\u201d the climate commissioner said on Thursday morning.<\/p>\n \u201cWe will continue to push China (and others) to go beyond the current level of ambition, and respect our joint commitments under the Paris Agreement,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Analysts shared Hoekstra\u2019s disappointment.<\/p>\n \u201cWith the EU and others still struggling to row forward, China could be hoisting its sails and leading the way,\u201d said Kate Logan, director of the China Climate Hub at the Asia Society Policy Institute. Instead, the \u201cunderwhelming\u201d 7-10% target represented a missed opportunity to deliver real leadership, she said.<\/p>\n Beijing\u2019s target was not just low on ambition, but an unrealistic understatement of current trends, analysts said.<\/p>\n \u201cChina\u2019s 2035 target simply isn\u2019t representative of the pace of the energy transition in the country,\u201d said Bernice Lee of Chatham House in the UK. \u201cThe reality is the country invested $625 billion in clean energy last year \u2013 31% of the global total,\u201d Lee said.<\/p>\n For Lauri Myllyvirta of the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA), the target should be seen as \u201ca floor, not a ceiling\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cSimply maintaining current rates of clean energy growth can deliver much larger reductions in emissions,\u201d Myllyvirta said.<\/p>\n This assessment echoed comments by Belinda Sch\u00e4pe, a China policy analyst at the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air, who spoke immediately after Xi\u2019s announcement.<\/p>\n The 7-10% emission cut was \u201cfar below what would be required to align with the Paris Agreement targets,\u201d Sch\u00e4pe said, arguing that the required CO2 reduction would have been around 30%, compared to 2024 levels.<\/p>\n \u201cOn the positive side, the current clean energy trends that we\u2019re seeing in China are very likely to deliver a much steeper emission reductions over the next decade,\u201d Sch\u00e4pe added.<\/p>\n United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) executive secretary Simon Stiell welcomed Xi\u2019s statement, adding his own positive spin.<\/p>\n The updated target implied an \u201cacceleration of climate action\u201d and sent a \u201csignal that the future global economy will run on clean energy,\u201d Stiell said. The Grenadian politician, who will oversee the COP30 climate conference in Brazil in November, was upbeat.<\/p>\n \u201cWe know China has a long and impressive record of meeting and surpassing its targets for climate change and clean energy,\u201d Stiell said.<\/p>\n (rh, aw)<\/p>\n Updated with additional comment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Climate Commissioner Wopke Hoekstra plans to push Beijing to go beyond its pledge \u2013 unveiled by President Xi…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":50821,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[242,85,46,141],"class_list":["post-50820","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-environment","tag-environment","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50820","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=50820"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50820\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/50821"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=50820"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=50820"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=50820"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}