Climate cooperation between the United States and China is more fraught now than it was just months ago, due to deepening bilateral frictions that threaten to leave the world in "serious trouble", Washington's chief climate envoy warned on Wednesday.
Cooperation on ways to limit climate change is "harder now because some of the differences of opinion between our countries have been hardened and sharpened, and that makes the diplomacy more complicated", John Kerry, the US special presidential envoy for climate, said.
Kerry said he believed that his Chinese counterpart, top climate diplomat Xie Zhenhua, was working in good faith to try to ramp up China's climate action, but expressed concern that the issue could become a bargaining chip in the increasingly confrontational relationship. He did not specify which side would take such an approach.
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"If climate becomes one of the tools, one of the weapons in the bilateral back and forth, we're cooked, we're in serious trouble," said Kerry, speaking at a virtual event hosted by the Washington-based Center for Global Development.
US-China relations have grown increasingly strained in recent months, amid complaints from Washington about Beijing's refusal to condemn Russia's invasion of Ukraine, as well as moves by China to enter into a security pact with the Solomon Islands.
Those new flashpoints come atop an extensive list of long-standing tensions that have characterised the relationship for the past several years, including complaints over human rights, technology disputes, trade tariffs, and territorial disputes in the South and East China Seas.
Against that backdrop, Kerry urged the US and China to keep the climate issue separated from other issues, stressing that both countries - along with the rest of the world - stood to suffer the consequences of rapidly melting ice caps.
"That includes in China, where Shanghai, Tianjin and other cities will be immersed in water, as well as Boston and Florida and plenty of other places in the United States," Kerry said.
"So people have got to get serious about this, which we just haven't evidenced as a civilisation that we are yet as serious as we need to be."
China has warned repeatedly that the US should not expect its cooperation on the climate crisis while frictions remain in other areas, though the two sides appeared to make progress in November when they signed an agreement pledging coordination on methane reduction and deforestation, among other issues.