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Cooperation and Conflict on Menu When Obama and Xi Jinping Meet China to Announce Cap-and-Trade Program to Limit Emissions
(about 17 hours later)
WASHINGTON — President Xi Jinping of China will arrive in Washington on Thursday for high-stakes meetings with President Obama that spotlight both the depth of their relationship and the increasingly bitter disputes that have strained it. WASHINGTON — President Xi Jinping of China will make a landmark commitment on Friday to start a national program in 2017 that will limit and put a price on greenhouse gas emissions, Obama administration officials said on Thursday.
The summit meeting will offer a chance for Mr. Obama and Mr. Xi to showcase their cooperation on tackling climate change and to signal to the world that both nations remain interested in maintaining a partnership. The move to create a so-called cap-and-trade system would be a substantial step by the world’s largest polluter to reduce emissions from major industries, including steel, cement, paper and electric power.
American officials have also said that the president will use the sessions to make clear the depth of his anger over cyberattacks that have emanated from China, his concerns about Chinese steps to reclaim islands in disputed areas of the South China Sea, and his opposition to Mr. Xi’s crackdown on dissidents and lawyers. The announcement, to come during a White House summit meeting with President Obama, is part of an ambitious effort by China and the United States to use their leverage internationally to tackle climate change and to pressure other nations to do the same.
All of those issues will be on the formal agenda on Friday, when Mr. Obama welcomes Mr. Xi for a state visit at the White House, complete with a 21-gun salute and a red-carpet ceremony on the South Lawn, a news conference in the East Room, and a black-tie dinner. Joining forces on the issue even as they are bitterly divided on others, Mr. Obama and Mr. Xi will spotlight the shared determination of the leaders of the world’s two largest economies to forge a climate change accord in Paris in December that commits every country to curbing their emissions.
But those who have watched the two presidents interact over the past three years — first in 2013 at the Sunnylands resort in Rancho Mirage, Calif., and then at a summit meeting last year hosted by Mr. Xi in Beijing — say that much of the important work is likely to get done at a dinner on Thursday night. Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. will greet Mr. Xi after he lands at Joint Base Andrews at 5 p.m. and also attend the dinner. Mr. Xi’s pledge underscores China’s intention to act quickly and upends what has long been a potent argument among Republicans against acting on climate change — that the United States’ most powerful economic competitor has not done so. But it is not clear whether China will be able to enact and enforce a program that substantially limits emissions.
“That’s the main event,” said Thomas E. Donilon, a former national security adviser to Mr. Obama, who helped orchestrate the administration’s first interactions with Mr. Xi. China’s economy depends heavily on cheap coal-fired electricity, and the country has a history of balking at outside reviews of its industries. China has also been plagued by major corruption cases, particularly among coal companies.
While formal meetings where each side recites carefully worded talking points and a long list of issues are important, the unscripted meal has the potential to allow the two leaders to break through on the most nettlesome issues. But the agreement, which American officials said had been in the works since April, is China’s first commitment to a specific plan to carry out what have so far been general ambitions.
“Far and away, the most constructive engagements they’ve had have been in their private dinners,” said Benjamin J. Rhodes, the deputy national security adviser for strategic communications. “They can step back, look at the strategic context, acknowledge the differences and some of the tensions that are there, but also look for what are the opportunities for the next areas where we can cooperate.” Domestic and external pressures have driven the Chinese government to take firmer action to curb emissions from fossil fuels, especially coal. Growing public anger about the noxious air that often envelops Beijing and many other Chinese cities has prompted the government to introduce restrictions on coal and other sources of smog, with the side benefit of reducing carbon dioxide pollution. The authorities also see economic benefits in reducing fossil fuel use.
The Chinese president, who began his visit to the United States with a stop in Seattle to meet with technology leaders and other business executives, said on Tuesday that he was ready to work with American officials to fight cybercrime. Still, even as Mr. Xi projected a soothing tone and steered clear of mentioning his differences with Mr. Obama, they seemed to trail him to the United States. The cap-and-trade initiative builds on a deal that Mr. Obama and Mr. Xi reached last year in Beijing, where both set steep emissions-reduction targets as a precursor to the global climate accord. Mr. Obama, who has made climate change a signature issue of his presidency, announced the centerpiece of his plan this year. With his announcement on Friday, Mr. Xi will outline how he will halt the growth of China’s emissions by 2030.
The White House on Tuesday said that it was deeply concerned about the arrest in China of an American businesswoman, Phan Phan-Gillis, and that Mr. Obama might raise the case with Mr. Xi. On Wednesday, the Office of Personnel Management, the agency that holds federal employees’ personnel records, announced that the cyberthieves who stole 22 million security dossiers — a breach that American officials attribute to the Chinese — had also obtained 5.6 million fingerprints. And the Defense Department said Wednesday that a Chinese fighter jet performed an unsafe maneuver last week while close to a United States spy plane over the Yellow Sea. “It increases our probability of succeeding, and it increases the likelihood that we will have a more robust agreement” in Paris, one senior administration official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because officials were not authorized to preview the agreement.
“It is important to note that the department has made tremendous progress with respect to reducing risk between our operational forces and those of the People’s Republic of China,” said Bill Urban, a Defense Department spokesman, who added that the Chinese had improved their “safety and professionalism” in air intercepts over the past year. Lu Kang, the spokesman for the Chinese delegation during Mr. Xi’s state visit, declined to confirm the climate initiative. He said only that the two presidents could “make further progress” in demonstrating that they are committed to dealing with global warming.
Mr. Obama and Mr. Xi are expected to announce an agreement this week on new rules governing episodes between American and Chinese military aircraft. The climate deal will be a substantial, if rare, bright spot in a wide-ranging summit meeting that is expected to be dominated by potential sources of friction between Mr. Obama and Mr. Xi. The two leaders began meeting on Thursday night with a working dinner at Blair House, across from the White House.
The president plans to raise a number of contentious topics on Friday, White House aides said, including cyberattacks on American companies and government agencies; China’s increasingly aggressive reclamation of islands and atolls in disputed areas of the South China Sea; and Mr. Xi’s clampdown on dissidents and lawyers in China.
Under a cap-and-trade system, a concept created by American economists, governments place a cap on the amount of carbon pollution that may be emitted annually. Companies can then buy and sell permits to pollute. Western economists have long backed the idea as a market-driven way to push industry to cleaner forms of energy, by making polluting energy more expensive.
Mr. Xi will pledge to put in place a “green dispatch” program intended to create a price incentive for generating power from low-carbon sources, officials said. He will agree to help provide financing to poorer countries to help them pay for projects that reduce harmful emissions. And China, one of the world’s largest financiers of infrastructure projects, will agree to “strictly limit” the amount of public financing that goes toward high-carbon projects, another official said, in line with a 2013 commitment by the United States Treasury Department to cease public financing for new coal-fired power plants.
In his first term, Mr. Obama tried to push a similar cap-and-trade program through Congress. But the measure died in the Senate, in part because lawmakers from both parties feared that a serious climate change policy could threaten economic competition with China. Now, however, China appears poised to enact the same climate change policy that Mr. Obama failed to move through Congress.
China has been developing and implementing smaller cap-and-trade programs for at least three years. In 2012, it started pilot programs in seven provinces, intended to serve as tests for a national program.
Last week, Chinese officials met in Los Angeles with top environmental officials from California, which has enacted an aggressive cap-and-trade program. People who attended the talks said they were meant to pave the way for a possible linkage of the Chinese and California cap-and-trade systems.
The Chinese announcement comes less than two months after Mr. Obama unveiled his signature climate change policy, a set of Environmental Protection Agency regulations that would force power plants to curb their carbon emissions. The rules could shut down hundreds of heavily polluting coal-fired power plants. They have drawn fire from Republicans and coal-state lawmakers, but international negotiators say Mr. Obama’s regulations have also helped break a longstanding deadlock between the United States and China on climate change.
Yet the two nations are still deeply divided on other issues. American and Chinese officials have been in negotiations over cyberattacks over the past several weeks, an area where they are bitterly at odds after several major intrusions believed to have emanated from China, including a hacking at the Office of Personnel Management that allowed the theft of 22 million security dossiers and 5.6 million fingerprints.
They are working to strike a deal that would reopen a high-level dialogue over cyberissues and set minimum standards, such as a mutual commitment not to attack each other’s critical infrastructure during peacetime. But they are not expected to reach any mutual understanding on cybertheft of intellectual property or personal information, one of the thorniest areas.
Similarly, the two presidents are unlikely to come to terms on the South China Sea, where Chinese moves to build runways on artificial islands in disputed areas have raised American fears of a confrontation in a critically important waterway.
The two presidents are expected to strike a deal on rules governing episodes involving Chinese and American military aircraft, building on past agreements that sought to avoid accidents or episodes that could escalate into confrontations.