China’s climate change chief on Trump: wise leaders don’t resist global trends
Four days after the Paris Agreement goes into force, the United States will hold its presidential election. Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has said in the past that he would “cancel the Paris climate agreement,” prompting a reporter to ask China’s special representative for climate change affairs, Xie Zhenhua, how the country would work with Trump on the issue. According to the Wall Street Journal, Xie said, “I don’t think ordinary people would agree if you were to reject that trend.” He went on to say, “I’m convinced, if it’s a wise leader — especially a political leader — he ought to know that all his policies should conform to the trends of global development.” It was a rare comment on a foreign country’s political process. Cooperation on climate change has been a relative bright spot in U.S.China relations of late, shining even from under the shadow of the South China Sea troubles. Ahead of the G20 summit in September, U.S. President Barack Obama stood on a stage in Hangzhou, China along with his
Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, to formally announce that the two countries had ratified the Paris Agreement. The climate deal, reached at last year’s UN conference on climate change, seeks to hold the rise in global temperatures below 2 degrees Celsius and shift away from fossil fuel usage.
