U.S. and China Announce Historic Emissions Reduction Pledges

In what could prove to be a momentum-setting piece of diplomacy, the United States and China — which together account for a third of the planet’s greenhouse gas emissions — jointly announced plans to pursue significant cuts in those emissions over the coming 10 to 15 years. Among the details of the joint pledges, unveiled as part of meetings this week between Chinese President Xi Jinping and U.S. President Barack Obama in Beijing, were commitments from the U.S. to cut its CO2 emissions by between 26 percent and 28 percent below 2005 levels by 2025. China, meanwhile, pledged to halt emissions growth by 2030, or earlier, and to increase the nation’s share of non-fossil energy sources to roughly 20 percent over the same time frame. The inability of the world’s two most consequential economies to agree on an approach to emissions reductions has been a key stumbling block in international climate negotiations for nearly two decades, and the announcement was met with cautious optimism by many climate experts, who characterized it as an important first step toward a global treaty.