Ahead of Wednesday’s Nov. 15 meeting between President Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping in San Francisco, the United States and China announced an agreement to address climate change. In a statement on Tuesday, Nov. 14, the State Department said both countries will “rise up to one of the greatest challenges of our time for present and future generations of humankind.”
We’re very close to hitting rock bottom.
Former Miami Herbert Business School Dean John Quelch
The two economic giants agreed to revive a bilateral climate working group, which China suspended last year amid growing tensions over Taiwan, that will address issues like energy transition, methane, resource efficiency, and deforestation. By 2030, both countries aim to halt and reverse deforestation and forest loss through regulation and policy, and enforcing bans on illegal imports.
According to the State Department, both sides have agreed to hold a “high-level event on subnational climate action in the first half of 2024.”
The announcement comes less than a month before the annual U.N. climate change conference in Dubai and hours before the first in-person meeting in a year between the two countries’ leaders. The two leaders last met in Bali in November 2022.
With U.S.-China relations strained over the past year, from a spy balloon to close calls in the air to new export rules over semiconductors, China expert and former Miami Herbert Business School Dean John Quelch tells Straight Arrow News that this meeting is a good sign of things to come for the relationship between the two countries.
“We’re very close to hitting rock bottom. And I see the meeting in San Francisco, following a series of cabinet visits to Beijing, as very encouraging that we will look back on this as the turning point and that the relationship will be improving henceforth,” Quelch said.