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Letters | Why the US and China must find common ground on climate change
- Financial regulators in both countries should encourage better disclosure around climate-related risks and ‘climate stress tests’. They owe it to their citizens and to the world
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The US and China must discover a common purpose. Today, in trade, continued tariffs and sanctions diminish bilateral trade and capital flows. In technology, heightened regulatory scrutiny of cross-border transactions underlines mutual suspicion over the distribution of sensitive technologies. And in politics, discord persists over conditions in Hong Kong, Western China and the South China Sea.
While time will tell how these uncertainties evolve, the US and China should seize the current moment to find common cause in tackling an inescapable challenge of shared importance: climate change.
They owe it to their citizens and to the world to get serious about reining in the most serious forms of emissions. Better climate policy is needed.
China is the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases, requiring the most pressing action to curb carbon dioxide emissions. China witnessed a 2.3 per cent increase in emissions in 2018 and, disturbingly, a 4 per cent increase during the first half of 2019.
The picture in the United States is almost as grim. Recent policies have walked back US federal climate policy, including a weakening of the Clean Power Plan and dilution of requirements for more energy-efficient light bulbs. Significantly, new federal rules would also revoke California’s authority to set its own emissions standards for vehicles that exceed federal standards.
Rolled-back federal climate law and the gutting of state-level climate measures make America’s withdrawal from the Paris climate accord all the more poignant.
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