This timeline is one of the deliverables from my undergraduate honors thesis on U.S.-China Climate Deal. I intended to identify key events and trends in the field of U.S-China climate politics in the past 10 years (2006-2016). By navigating through this timeline, you can find key political, economic, environmental, technological development, and other events. You can also read the original article by clicking on each event. This product is still a work in progress, the sources are limited to New York Times, Global Times, China Daily, and the Washington Post. If you have any questions or comments, please email me at tina_huang1994@berkeley.edu
During a visit to Tokyo last week, China's prime minister, Wen Jiabao, announced that his country was prepared to take part in negotiations on a new agreement limiting global warming emissions, to replace Kyoto Protocol provisions that expire in 2012. China is not subject to the accord's binding emissions targets, but its commitment to talk raises real hope that it may be open to the idea.
EPA and the Clean Power Plan is based on the Court's 5-to-4 decision in 2007 in Massachusetts v. Environmental Protection Agency, which required the agency to regulate emissions of greenhouse gases from new motor vehicles if it found that they endangered public health or welfare.
President Hu Jintao's most ambitious attempt to change the culture of fast-growth collapsed this year. The project, known as ''Green G.D.P.,'' was an effort to create an environmental yardstick for evaluating the performance of every official in China. It recalculated gross domestic product, or G.D.P., to reflect the cost of pollution.
delegates agreed to negotiate by 2009 a new and more comprehensive global treaty to replace the Kyoto Protocol. (Kyoto expires in 2012 and requires that only industrialized nations reduce their production of greenhouse gases.) They pledged for the first time to address deforestation, which accounts for one-fifth of the world's carbon dioxide emissions. And they received vague assurances from China -- which will soon overtake the United States as the biggest emitter of greenhouse gases -- and other emerging powers that they would seek ''measurable, reportable and verifiable'' emissions cuts.
Congressional negotiators reached a deal late Friday on energy legislation that would force American automakers to improve the fuel efficiency of their cars and light trucks by 40 percent by 2020.
Xie Zhenhua, the head of the Chinese delegation, reiterated that as a developing country China should not have to make such numerical commitments, but that it would ''take positive and effective mitigation and adaptation measures.''
A Roadmap for U.S.-China Cooperation on Energy and Climate Change,'' is a joint project of the Asia Society and the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, propose ways for President Obama and Chinese leaders to begin addressing together, as a major priority, how to curb emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases linked to rising temperatures.
According to the Pew Charitable Trusts, China surpassed the United States and other members of the G-20 for the first time as the leader in clean energy investment.
The United States last year assembled a group of 17 nations called the Major Economies Forum on Energy and Climate Change , which took up climate as one of its major issues and which will continue discussions in parallel to the United Nations process
Many Chinese -- not only politicians, but academic society and the general public -- would say that before the U.S. blames China, the U.S. should clean up first,'' said Ms. Zhang, a professor of environmental economics and policy at Peking University.
The bill passed a House of Representatives committee last month and is regarded as the most serious effort yet to reduce U.S. contributions to climate change. But at a United Nations-led conference in Bonn, Germany, and at a summit of mega-emitters America and China in Beijing, some environmental groups and foreign governments derided it for a lack of ambition.
China has built the world's largest solar panel manufacturing industry by exporting over 95 percent of its output to the United States and Europe. But when China authorized its first solar power plant this spring, it required that at least 80 percent of the equipment be made in China.
Obama-Hu Talk: The United States and China have agreed to cooperate on developing an inventory of China's greenhouse gas emissions, the Environmental Protection Agency announced Wednesday, an initiative that appears be a response to criticism of Beijing's data collection.
In addition to the energy-efficiency objective in the current five-year plan, a plan announced by President Hu Jintao late last year called for China to reduce its carbon emissions per unit of economic output by 40 to 45 percent by 2020, compared with 2005 levels.
The economic tension between the United States and China escalated on Friday, as the Obama administration pledged to investigate Beijing's subsidies to its growing clean energy industries while delaying a politically volatile report on the Chinese currency.
Senior Chinese officials said on Tuesday that next week's climate talks in Cancun, Mexico, would succeed only if the West agreed to transfer technology to developing countries like China and to take the lead in cutting emissions. The comments by one of China's senior officials in charge of climate issues, Xie Zhenhua of the powerful National Development and Reform Commission, were mirrored by two other senior Chinese climate officials who earlier this week published a report saying China was willing to make concessions -- if developed nations put money into a $30 billion fund aimed at helping poor nations cope with global warming.Modest progress at United Nations climate talks on Saturday was overshadowed by a continuing deadlock between China and the United States, clouding prospects for a major climate conference next month in Cancun, Mexico.
China’s 12 th Five Year Plan (2011-2015)
Obama started his firm term, 2009: The abandonment of the A.E.P. plant comes in response to a string of reversals for federal climate change policy. President Obama spent his first year in office pushing a goal of an 80 percent reduction in climate-altering emissions by 2050, a target that could be met only with widespread adoption of carbon-capture and storage at coal plants around the country. The administration's stimulus package provided billions of dollars to speed development of the technology; the climate change bill passed by the House in 2009 would have provided tens of billions of dollars in additional incentives for what industry calls ''clean coal.''But all such efforts collapsed last year with the Republican takeover of the House and the continuing softness in the economy, which killed any appetite for far-reaching environmental measures.
The Obama administration's protectionist trade policy on renewable energy. Over the past years, the US government has imposed stiff punitive anti-dumping and countervailing duties on solar and wind products from China. Obama’s protectionist policy that undermines China's renewable industry and the climate cause will tarnish this legacy.
Solar panel manufacturers in the United States are now lobbying the Obama administration to broaden the tariffs to include solar panels made partly in China and partly in other places, notably Taiwan. And the American industry is not ruling out more trade cases against other Asian solar panel exporters.
The establishment of the China- U.S Climate Change Working Group
agreement reached this month between Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping to wind down production and consumption of hydrofluorocarbons, chemicals used in refrigerators and air conditioners that are potent producers of greenhouse gases.
Mr. Obama raised the issue of cybercrime with Mr. Xi at their first leader-to-leader meeting at the Sunnylands estate in Rancho Mirage, Calif., By all accounts, that conversation did not go well, and the dialogue has only gotten testier since then.
On human rights, the signals were disquieting. While the Chinese government granted passports to relatives of Chen Guangcheng, a blind lawyer who sought asylum in the United States last year, a Chinese court on Sunday sentenced a brother-in-law of Liu Xiaobo, the persecuted Nobel Peace Prize winner, to 11 years in prison on trumped-up charges of fraud
The United States and China agreed Wednesday to tighten pollution standards on heavy trucks, boost energy efficiency in buildings and take a series of other steps to curb greenhouse-gas emissions in the world's top two polluting countries. The climate discussions were part of the broader Strategic and Economic Dialogue between the United States and China being held this week in Washington.
Under Wednesday's agreement, China and the United States consented to build "several large-scale" demonstration projects to try to "overcome barriers" to the wider use of carbon-capture technology.
China’s Belt and Road Initiative
In the early hours of Wednesday, Mr. Singh said, the refusal of developed nations to consider seriously the creation of a new mechanism prompted a group of developing countries known as the Group of 77 and China to walk out of the talks, sending ''a very strong message that they can't go home from Warsaw without a loss-and-damage mechanism.''
The oil and gas industry has spent about $1.5 billion on registered lobbying in the past 15 years and hundreds of millions on federal campaign contributions. This industry largesse has helped bury climate-change information and policies, while the United States and the world suffer ever more disasters.
In the past couple of years, the United States has experienced the worst East Coast flooding in decades, as well as the most intense and largest drought in decades; 2012 was the warmest year on record in the lower 48 states. Massive forest fires have blazed throughout the drought-ridden West. Globally, the number of weather-related catastrophes has roughly doubled since 1980 , according to comprehensive data collected by the insurance company Munich Re. There is more bad news to come: rising sea levels, more-acidic oceans and more climate-related disasters.
Chinese leaders on Wednesday held talks with visiting US Vice President Joe Biden to push ahead a new model of relationship between China and the US"The new model of major power relations between China and the US is now in the process of development. It stands at a relatively mature stage as the two countries enjoy common interests, close economic ties and nearly 100 mechanisms of dialogue. The two can deal with conflict and competition in a calm way," Ni Feng, a deputy director of the Institute of American Studies at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, told the Global Times.
Chinese leaders on Wednesday held talks with visiting US Vice President Joe Biden to push ahead a new model of relationship between China and the US, at a time of rising regional tensions stemming from China's newly established Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ) over the East China Sea.During the meeting,
Chinese Premier Li Keqiang (R) talks with US Secretary of State John Kerry during meetings in Beijing on Feb 2014 The world's top emitters of greenhouse gases, pledged on Saturday to work together to attenuate the effects of global climate change.Enter story info here
Chinese officials announced Thursday that they were offering a total of 10 billion renminbi, or $1.65 billion, this year to cities and regions that make ''significant progress'' in air pollution control, according to a report by Xinhua, the state-run news agency.
China declined to hold a human rights dialogue with the United States this year, apparently in retribution for President Obama's meeting in February with the Dalai Lama, the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader who promotes autonomy from China.
a United Nations panel warned that governments , including China and the United States are not doing enough to avert profound risks in coming decades.
Obama’s june announcement said he would use his executive authority to push through an aggressive set of regulations on coal-fired power plants in the United States -- the nation's largest source of greenhouse gas pollution -- set off a firestorm of legal, political and legislative opposition at home. Critics have called it a ''war on coal'' that could devastate the American economy.
The White House issued a report Tuesday warning that the United States could face billions of dollars in added economic costs if it delays action to curb the greenhouse-gas emissions linked to climate change. According to the report, each decade of delay will make it 40 percent more expensive to eventually reach the identical global climate target. The analysis, issued by the president's Council of Economic Advisers, comes at a time when the Obama administration is struggling to incorporate the costs associated with global warming into its energy decisions
During Xi Jinping's participation in the sixth round of China-U.S. Strategic and Economic Dialogue and the opening of the fifth round of High-Level Consultation on People-to-People Exchange on July 9,2014 , which helped pave the way for US President Barack Obama's visit to China November 2015 . The S&ED and the CPE are among about 90 multi-level dialogue mechanisms created by the two countries, which are aimed at promoting understanding, boosting trust and enhancing cooperation.
In a closed-door session at a high-level gathering of Chinese and American officials here on Wednesday, Secretary of State John Kerry urged China to follow maritime law in nearby seas to reduce regional tensions, a senior American official said.Mr. Kerry called on China to support the creation of a legally binding code of conduct that other Asian nations are considering to enforce rules of navigation and inhibit unilateral actions in the South China and East China Seas, said the official, who briefed reporters on the condition of anonymity under standard protocol.
Germany's relentless push into renewable energy has implications far beyond its shores. By creating huge demand for wind turbines and especially for solar panels, it has helped lure big Chinese manufacturers into the market, and that combination is driving down costs faster than almost anyone thought possible just a few years ago.
China proposed the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, which U.S is not part of
China and the US are taking different approaches to nuclear energy, as both nations map out a strategy for their recent agreement to curb greenhouse-gas emissions.China will become the world's largest renewable energy market by 2030 if it can double the ratio of such sources as solar and wind in the total energy mix to 26 percent, said by the International Renewable Energy Agency
Chinese President Xi Jinping and his US counterpart Barack Obama made a historic joint announcement in Beijing, during APEC (Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation) summit THE DEAL ITSELF . The two leaders did sign an agreement at that meeting to cut hydrofluorocarbon emissions, and the White House hopes to build on that this week in broader discussions between Mr. Obama and Mr. Xi about climate change.Also established the China-US Clean Energy Research Center
Mr. Xi won approval Tuesday from the 21 countries of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum to study the creation of a China-led free-trade zone that would be an alternative to Mr. Obama's Trans-Pacific Partnership, a 12-nation trading bloc that excludes China.
China plans to set a cap on coal consumption in 2020, an important step for the country in trying to achieve a recently announced goal of having carbon dioxide emissions peak by around 2030.The State Council, China's cabinet, released details of an energy strategy late Wednesday that includes capping coal consumption at 4.2 billion tons in 2020 and having coal be no more than 62 percent of the primary energy mix by that year.
China hopes that the climate change talks in Lima, Peru, attended by more than 190 countries, will lead to an agreement in Paris next year that reflects common but differentiated responsibilities and fairness. China, although it agreed to cuts, is hesitating about allowing outside monitoring of its emissions
China will face rising temperatures and more extreme weather conditions such as large-scale drought and flooding this year, and sea levels will continue to rise due to the impact of climate change, according to a new report. At the same time, negative impacts are felt on a number of fronts, including yields and quality of grain, water resources, marine environment and ecosystems and cities, Liu says.As the largest developing country, China is very vulnerable to climate change. More than 70 percent of natural disasters are associated with extreme weather and climate events.
President Obama's latest move using executive authority to tackle climate change, administration officials will announce plans this week to impose new regulations on the oil and gas industry's emissions of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, according to a person familiar with Mr. Obama's plans. The administration's goal is to cut methane emissions from oil and gas production by up to 45 percent by 2025 from the levels recorded in 2012.
By U.S’ estimate, China actually would need to develop something around 800 gigawatts of renewable or nuclear energy between now and 2030, that's more than all the coal that is used in China now."
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