AFP UK

A key UN summit tasked with protecting biodiversity officially opens in China and online Monday, as countries meet to tackle pollution and prevent mass extinction weeks before the COP26 climate conference.

Beijing, the world’s biggest polluter, has sought to position itself in recent years as a world leader on climate issues after Washington’s withdrawal from international commitments under the Trump administration.

The online session that begins Monday afternoon — setting the stage for a face-to-face meeting in April — will see parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) working out the details of a new document that will set targets for protecting ecosystems by 2030.

Up for debate are the “30 by 30” plan to give 30 percent of lands and oceans protected status — a measure supported by a broad coalition of nations, as well as a goal to stop creating plastic waste.

China has not yet committed to the “30 by 30” plan.

This year’s COP15 gathering, hosted in the southwest city of Kunming, was originally set for 2020 and postponed due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Around one million animal and plant species are threatened with extinction amid human encroachment on habitats, over-exploitation, pollution, the spread of invasive species, and climate change. 

The CBD has been ratified by 195 countries and the European Union — although not the United States, the world’s biggest historical polluter — with parties meeting every two years.

– Division over targets –

China said on Friday it has “given high priority to the protection of biodiversity by establishing a network of protected areas and national parks.”

And this week Beijing is expected to unveil a statement known as the Kunming Declaration, which would set the tone for its environmental leadership.

But sharp divisions remain over the targets for urgent action over the next decade.

France and Costa Rica are among a coalition of support for the initiative to declare 30 percent of oceans and lands protected areas before 2030.

But when scientists called for more ambitious protection of half of Earth’s biodiversity, Brazil and South Africa strongly opposed.

Other sources of tension surround financing, with developing nations asking rich countries to foot the bill for their ecological transitions.

These issues will be at the heart of negotiation sessions set to take place in Geneva in January 2022.

The biodiversity discussions at COP15 are separate from weightier COP26 summit set to begin next month in Glasgow, where world leaders are under pressure to act on the climate crisis.

The Glasgow summit faces a packed agenda dominated by efforts to persuade countries such as China and India to commit to binding “nationally determined contributions” towards net zero emissions.

China has pledged to peak carbon emissions in 2030 and reach zero emissions by 2060, but environmentalists have flagged the huge amount of coal-fired power being brought online in recent years by the world’s top emitter of greenhouse gases.

The transition towards cleaner energy has made progress but not quick enough to limit global warming to well below 2 degrees Celsius, as agreed in the 2015 Paris climate agreement.

While the Covid-19 pandemic initially caused a drop in greenhouse gas emissions as economic activity dropped, the pandemic may not have accelerated the shift to renewables:

– Renewables boom –

Renewables are now the number two source of electricity in the world with a 26 percent share in 2019 — behind coal, but ahead of natural gas and nuclear.

Wind and solar power have grown at annual rates of 22 and 36 percent, respectively as their prices have plunged since 1990.

Even during the pandemic, 26 gigawatts (GW) of capacity was added last year, setting a new record, according to the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA).

But the use of fossil fuels in final consumption (electricity, transportation fuel, heating and factory production) has held steady.

At 80.3 percent in 2009, it was still 80.2 percent in 2019, as overall energy consumption increases thanks to population growth as well as rising incomes in Asia.

– Sharp turn by automakers –

Pushed by tighter pollution regulations, leading automakers are aiming to scrap internal combustion engines within the next decade or sharply cut their production as they shift towards all-electric futures.

Roads are still crowded with polluting cars: Electric vehicles only make up five percent of new units sold.

The International Energy Agency says consumers continue to prefer big SUVs — they accounted for 42 percent of sales in 2020 — that pollute more than smaller models.

– Hydrogen –

From Australia to China to the EU, more and more nations are setting their sites on green hydrogen for lorries and factories.

While burning hydrogen as a fuel emits just water, most of the gas is made in a process that produces harmful emissions.

Finding cost effective ways to produce hydrogen cleanly and developing the infrastructure for its use will require more effort, with the IEA urging a quadrupling of investments in the sector.

– Carbon pricing –

In mid-2020 some 44 countries and 31 cities accounting for 60 percent of global economic output had carbon pricing (taxes or quotas) schemes in place, according to the I4CE think tank.

Carbon prices aim to make polluters pay for some of the social costs of emissions such as health care costs due to poor air quality and crop damage due to climate change. 

Experts say the price needs to be between $40 and $80 per tonne of CO2 to push polluters to increase efficiency or shift to renewable energy sources. 

However, the price is under $10 for 75 percent of covered emissions.

– Pandemic investment –

The Ren 21 think tank said the coronavirus pandemic provided an opportunity to shift public policy, but countries provided six times as much investment money to fossil fuel than renewable energy projects in their economic recovery plans.

After dropping by seven percent thanks to the pandemic, CO2 emissions are expected to hit new records by 2023 if those investments are not shifted.

– Emerging difficulties –

Investment in renewable energy has been sliding for several years in emerging and developing nations except for China, and the coronavirus pandemic has done nothing to change the situation.

These countries hold two-thirds of the world’s population and are responsible for 90 percent of the growth in emissions, but they are receiving only 20 percent of investments into clean energy, according to the IEA.

– King coal still reigns –

Long ago baptised “king coal” for its outsize role in powering the world economy, the fuel remains in wide use in Asia to meet the growing needs for electricity in the region.

The global economic recovery means that coal demand is likely to surpass its 2019 level and thus also retain its crown of being the leading source of greenhouse gas emissions.

China, which has been a major financer of coal projects in other nations, announced in September it is halting the practice.

The Nobel Economics Prize on Monday wraps up a Nobel season characterised by surprising picks, with a number of women in with a chance of scooping the traditionally male-dominated prize.

Macroeconomics, health and labour markets are some of the favourite topics ahead of the announcement, according to experts interviewed by AFP.

The final prize of the year, officially the Sveriges Riksbank (Sweden’s central bank) Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, will be announced at 11:45 am (0945 GMT).

This Nobel season, only one woman has won — Philippine journalist Maria Ressa who won the Peace Prize on Friday — while the economics prize has so far only been awarded to two women in history, Elinor Ostrom in 2009 and Esther Duflo in 2019. 

American Anne Krueger, formerly the number two and briefly the managing director at the International Monetary Fund (IMF), as well as a former Vice President for Economics and Research at the World Bank, is one possible winner.

At 87, she is also “getting older, which usually isn’t a handicap when it comes to winning Nobel Prizes”, Micael Dahlen, a professor in marketing at the Stockholm School of Economics, told AFP.

Her compatriot Claudia Goldin, whose research has focused on inequality and the female labour force, is another favourite to become the third woman to receive the prize.

Other potential female winners are fellow American Janet Currie, known for her work on the impact of government anti-poverty programmes on children, or Belgian labour economist Marianne Bertrand and American microeconomist Susan Athey, who was the first woman to win the prestigious John Bates Clark Medal in 2007.

– Hundreds of candidates –

However, as with any of the Nobels, accurately predicting the winner is a challenge as there is a plethora of economists for the committee to choose from.

“There are around 250-300 serious candidates,” Hubert Fromlet, an affiliated professor with the Linnaeus University in Sweden, wrote in a paper predicting potential winners.

Given that the entire selection process, including nominations, has taken place during the Covid-19 pandemic, Dahlen said it would also be “very topical” to focus on an economist like Paul Slovic. 

Slovic is a professor of psychology at the University of Oregon who has looked into how people weigh risk, and introduced the concept of “psychic numbing”, the indifference that can set in when people are confronted with an overwhelming calamity.

It could also be time to shine a spotlight on the field of macroeconomics, especially given the economic fallout of the pandemic, and the historical zero-interest policies of central banks around the world even before Covid-19.

For Dahlen, a frontrunner would be Roger W. Garrison.

According to Clarivate, which maintains a list of potential Nobel Prize winners, other potential macroeconomists that could be honoured are Japan’s Nobuhiro Kiyotaki and his at-times writing partner John Moore of the UK.

In the context of financial crises, American Douglas Diamond has also been cited as a potential candidate.

Another oft-mentioned economist believed to be in the running is Israeli-American Joshua Angrist, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) who is an expert on labour economics and the economics of education and who has also made contributions to the field of econometrics, potentially together with Canadian labour economist David Card.

– ‘False Nobel’ –

French economists Olivier Blanchard, former chief economist at the IMF, and Thomas Piketty, who rose to prominence with his book “Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” have also attracted attention.

But given disagreements about Piketty’s conclusions he would be a “controversial choice”, according to Fromlet.

Last year, the honour went to US economists Paul Milgrom and Robert Wilson for their work on theories of auctions as well as inventing new auction formats.

The economics prize was the only prize not among the original five set out by the will of Alfred Nobel, who died in 1896. 

It was instead created through a donation from the Swedish central bank in 1968, and detractors have thus dubbed it “a false Nobel”.

The prize will close the 2021 Nobel season, which so far has seen the peace prize awarded to Ressa, who is also a US citizen, and fellow journalist Dmitry Muratov of Russia. 

The literature prize was won by Tanzanian-born novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah.

The medicine prize, which opened the week, went to US scientists David Julius and Ardem Patapoutian for discoveries on receptors for temperature and touch.

The chemistry prize went to Germany’s Benjamin List and Scottish-American David MacMillan for their work on catalysts. 

For the first time, the physics prize went to two climate scientists, Japanese-American scientist Syukuro Manabe and Klaus Hasselmann of Germany, with the second half of the prize going to Giorgio Parisi of Italy.

A hundred billion dollars every year –- that’s the aid promised more than a decade ago to help developing nations curb their carbon pollution and adapt to devastating climate impacts. 

But rich countries have not delivered on that pledge, a failure that could undermine a critical COP26 climate summit in Glasgow next month already riven with tensions, experts say.

– The Context –

The vow to gradually ramp up aid for the Global South to $100 billion (86.5 billion euros) per year by 2020 was first made at the 2009 UN climate summit in Copenhagen. 

A decade later, wealthy nations were still far from the mark, with the total below $80 billion in 2019, according to the OECD, which took on the role of tracking climate finance.

If only outright grants and not loans are considered, the amount drops by almost half, say NGOs that monitor money flows.

With a Democrat back in the White House, the US has doubled its aid and promises $11.4 billion per year by 2024, but it’s still not enough to close the gap. Canada and Germany are expected to announce enhanced commitments before the Glasgow summit opens on October 31.

China may be the world’s top carbon polluter today, accounting for more than a quarter of global emissions, but the United States and other rich countries are historically the main emitters of greenhouse gases. 

COP26 host Boris Johnson recently reminded leaders at the UN that Britain had pioneered the industrial revolution and was the first country “to send enough acrid smoke into the atmosphere to disrupt the natural order”. 

“We understand that when developing countries look to us for help, we have to shoulder our responsibilities,” the British Prime Minister continued.

– Stakes high at COP26 –

One of the biggest challenges facing climate negotiations is a deficit of trust among parties, and climate finance may be the most fraught issue on the table.

“The shortfall in funds is costing lives and livelihoods,” Sonam Wangi, chair of the Least Developed Countries (LDC) negotiating bloc, said in a statement. 

“Developed countries delivering on their decade-old commitment to support vulnerable countries … will be critical for building trust and accelerating the global response to climate change.”

UN climate chief Patricia Espinosa agrees that living up to those promises could be a key for unlocking other logjams.

“The complexity of the outcome of COP26 is that it is not one or two or three decisions, it has to be a package,” she told journalists.  

“If we can get a good perspective regarding the $100 billion, that would … give us the means to make progress on some other issues.”

– $100 billion a floor, not a ceiling –

In 2009, $100 billion sounded like a lot of money, but the recent crescendo of heatwaves, flooding caused by extreme rainfall, drought and evermore powerful storms has made it clear that it’s not nearly enough, experts agree.

The sum seems especially paltry compared to the multi-trillion dollar Covid recovery packages that have been cobbled together to prop up rich economies.

“A combined global fiscal response to the crisis of close to $12 trillion begs a question,” climate finance experts commissioned by the UN wrote in a recent report. 

“If a pandemic can provoke such a rapid and far-reaching response, at scale, surely the world can muster the necessary will to act with similar decisiveness and urgency in response to the climate crisis?”

“The $100 billion target therefore needs to be seen as a floor and not as a ceiling,” the added.

Former Maldives president Mohamed Nasheed, representing the Climate Vulnerable Forum of 48 countries home to a billion people, said financing should be broadened to include sovereign debt relief.

“We are so threatened that we might not have an island or a country much longer, so it’s hardly possible for us to pay the debt if we are not around,” he said.  

“Is it not then reasonable for climate vulnerable countries to call upon debt holders to restructure their debt?”, he added, saying he would be taking this proposal to the Glasgow talks.

– Symbols of justice –

The $100 billion figure — earmarked for emissions reduction and preparing for future climate impact — has become a symbol of the perceived need for “climate justice”, many observers point out.

The failure of rich nations to honour their pledge is especially galling in light of a separate track in the negotiations over “loss and damage”, meant to cover the costs of climate-enhanced damages that have already occurred.

“The people and communities the least responsible for the rise in global emissions are facing the worst of the climate crisis right now,” said Vanessa Nakate, a young climate activist from Uganda.

 bur-so/mh/pvh

Global momentum is building on the climate crisis but action will be impossible without two nations, China and the United States, which together account for more than half of emissions — and whose governments don’t get along.

Ahead of the COP26 summit in Glasgow, experts believe that breakthrough US-China cooperation could be the catalyst for a historic agreement on climate change — but also that frosty ties between Washington and Beijing are not, so to speak, the end of the world.

Both nations have stepped up efforts to curb emissions, although analysts say that actions are far too modest to meet a UN-backed goal of keeping the planet’s temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.6 degrees Fahrenheit) and avoiding the worst effects of climate change.

“If the national governments of China and the US are not able to agree on anything of substance, I think there may well be room for serious action anyway, because both countries are able and willing to do a lot on their own,” said Mary Nichols, who led major climate initiatives as chair of the California Air Resources Board.

“But that doesn’t mean that it’s irrelevant,” she said. “Without an explicit agreement, other countries will be reluctant to act.”

US President Joe Biden’s administration has described Beijing as his country’s top long-term challenge and raised pressure on concerns from human rights to Taiwan to trade but has sought engagement on climate.

“It is not a mystery that China and the US have many differences. But on climate, cooperation — it is the only way to break free from the world’s current mutual suicide pact,” John Kerry, the US climate envoy, said in a recent speech.

– ‘Race to top’? –

Kerry has traveled twice to China despite a chill in relations. But on his latest visit, Foreign Minister Wang Yi issued a warning.

“It is impossible for China-US climate cooperation to be elevated above the overall environment of China-US relations,” Wang said.

The remarks raised concern in Washington that the Biden-Kerry approach could backfire, allowing China to use climate as leverage.

But Chinese President Xi Jinping soon afterward took a major step by telling the United Nations that Beijing would stop funding coal in its overseas infrastructure-building blitz, although it is still investing at home in the dirty but politically sensitive form of energy.

Alex Wang, faculty co-director of the Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the University of California, Los Angeles, said that China and the United States could engage in a “race to the top” on who does more.

“It improves China’s global reputation to appear as a positive actor on climate,” Wang said.

“If the leaders in China feel like they are becoming laggards, I think it would lead to some pressure to act further, and it would be a reason to disregard the voices from fossil fuel industries or coal industry within the country,” he said.

“But without the pressure then the balance shifts in favor of slower action.”

He drew a contrast with Biden’s predecessor Donald Trump, whose climate skepticism meant little pressure on Beijing to tackle coal.

– Potentially powerful steps –

Nichols, who helped design California’s cap-and-trade program that creates a market with incentives for reducing emissions, said one major step would be if China agreed to link efforts to set a common price on carbon.

“That would, I think, send an extraordinarily strong signal to investors and businesses around the world,” said Nichols, now a fellow at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy.

California already has linked its market to Quebec, taking a lead in action even before Biden’s election.

With so many areas of tension between the United States and China, a multilateral process such as COP26 may be more effective in any case than bilateral talks, said Jacob Stokes, a fellow at the Center for a New American Security.

“Neither side wants to be seen as doing this as some sort of favor to the other side,” he said.

And with China already the world’s second-largest economy, Stokes said that US policymakers may want to focus climate diplomacy on poorer nations.

“Is it more important to expend effort to get concessions from Beijing or to try to finance expansion of clean power in the rest of the developing world that still has a lot more energy-intensive development to do?” 

For its supporters, nuclear energy is the world’s best — perhaps only — hope to avoid catastrophic climate change. Opponents say it is too expensive, too risky and totally unnecessary.

Standing between the two camps are those who see atomic power as a necessary evil that will buy the time needed to develop cleaner and safer alternatives.

“We don’t have the luxury of choosing one or the other,” said Fatih Birol, executive director of the International Energy Agency, which advises developed countries.

It’s a hotly contested debate that continues to divide specialists and policymakers alike.

Unlike wind, solar and hydropower, nuclear plants do not depend on often unreliable climatic factors. A combination of drought and low winds, for example, has been blamed for the recent surge in natural gas prices that is stoking demand for dirty alternatives such as coal and oil.

Still, nuclear stations are plagued by high construction costs — with recent projects taking longer to complete and blowing out budgets — as well as the thorny problem of disposing of highly toxic waste and decommissioning power stations.

On the plus side, nuclear reactors create massive amounts of power with no direct emissions of carbon dioxide.

Even taking into account the emissions associated with mining uranium for fuel and the concrete, steel and other materials used in construction, nuclear power emits very few greenhouse gases: much less than coal or gas, and even less than solar, according to some studies.

– ‘Absolutely vital’ –

“Everything that brings emissions down is good news,” said Birol.

The IEA says nuclear power has avoided about 55 gigatonnes of CO2 emissions over the past five decades — about two years of global energy-related emissions of the greenhouse gas.

For those reasons, nuclear energy accounts for a bigger share of the world power mix in most of the scenarios put forward by the IPCC — the UN’s climate experts — to hold average global temperatures to 1.5 degrees Celsius above where they were at the end of the 19th century. 

The International Atomic Energy Agency — whose mission includes the promotion of nuclear power — has raised its projections for the first time since the 2011 disaster at Japan’s Fukushima power plant, and now expects installed capacity to double by 2050 under the most favourable scenario.

Nuclear power is “absolutely vital in our efforts to achieve net zero emissions,” IAEA Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi said. 

That’s a central objective of the next major climate conference, COP26, to be held in Glasgow in November. 

But while some countries — most notably China — are building new reactors, others are shuttering old ones: 5.5 gigawatts of capacity were installed worldwide in 2019 while 9.4 GW were permanently closed, the IEA says.

The divide runs through the European Union: while Germany decided to phase out nuclear power after Fukushima, countries such as Poland and the Czech Republic see it as a way to reduce dependence on coal. 

“In the Czech Republic, nuclear energy is seen as a reliable and relatively cheap source of electricity,” said Wadim Strielkowski, an energy expert at the Prague Business School.

This division is reflected in the debate in Brussels about whether or not to include nuclear power in the green “taxonomy”, the classification of activities deemed good for the climate and the environment.

– False economy –

Opponents of nuclear power such as Greenpeace have put aside their traditional arguments — stemming from pacifism and fears about nuclear waste — to focus on efficiency calculations.  

The costs of renewables have been falling steadily while major nuclear projects are expensive and have suffered major overruns.

“Spending money today on new nuclear power worsens the climate crisis, because investments are not being made in what is cheaper, faster and therefore more efficient,” said Mycle Schneider, author of a critical annual report on nuclear.

However, the nuclear industry has another trick up its sleeve.

For some years now, it has been betting heavily on small modular reactors (SMRs): simpler, mass-produced in factories, they are less likely to go awry than huge construction sites.

So far, only Russia has commissioned this technology — for a groundbreaking floating plant. Still, there are signs of interest from other countries.

“The future of nuclear energy, whether in the Czech Republic or elsewhere in the world, could be small reactors,” said Strielkowski. 

A hundred billion dollars every year –- that’s the aid promised more than a decade ago to help developing nations curb their carbon pollution and adapt to devastating climate impacts. 

But rich countries have not delivered on that pledge, a failure that could undermine a critical COP26 climate summit in Glasgow next month already riven with tensions, experts say.

– The Context –

The vow to gradually ramp up aid for the Global South to $100 billion (86.5 billion euros) per year by 2020 was first made at the 2009 UN climate summit in Copenhagen. 

A decade later, wealthy nations were still far from the mark, with the total below $80 billion in 2019, according to the OECD, which took on the role of tracking climate finance.

If only outright grants and not loans are considered, the amount drops by almost half, say NGOs that monitor money flows.

With a Democrat back in the White House, the US has doubled its aid and promises $11.4 billion per year by 2024, but it’s still not enough to close the gap. Canada and Germany are expected to announce enhanced commitments before the Glasgow summit opens on October 31.

China may be the world’s top carbon polluter today, accounting for more than a quarter of global emissions, but the United States and other rich countries are historically the main emitters of greenhouse gases. 

COP26 host Boris Johnson recently reminded leaders at the UN that Britain had pioneered the industrial revolution and was the first country “to send enough acrid smoke into the atmosphere to disrupt the natural order”. 

“We understand that when developing countries look to us for help, we have to shoulder our responsibilities,” the British Prime Minister continued.

– Stakes high at COP26 –

One of the biggest challenges facing climate negotiations is a deficit of trust among parties, and climate finance may be the most fraught issue on the table.

“The shortfall in funds is costing lives and livelihoods,” Sonam Wangi, chair of the Least Developed Countries (LDC) negotiating bloc, said in a statement. 

“Developed countries delivering on their decade-old commitment to support vulnerable countries … will be critical for building trust and accelerating the global response to climate change.”

UN climate chief Patricia Espinosa agrees that living up to those promises could be a key for unlocking other logjams.

“The complexity of the outcome of COP26 is that it is not one or two or three decisions, it has to be a package,” she told journalists.  

“If we can get a good perspective regarding the $100 billion, that would … give us the means to make progress on some other issues.”

– $100 billion a floor, not a ceiling –

In 2009, $100 billion sounded like a lot of money, but the recent crescendo of heatwaves, flooding caused by extreme rainfall, drought and evermore powerful storms has made it clear that it’s not nearly enough, experts agree.

The sum seems especially paltry compared to the multi-trillion dollar Covid recovery packages that have been cobbled together to prop up rich economies.

“A combined global fiscal response to the crisis of close to $12 trillion begs a question,” climate finance experts commissioned by the UN wrote in a recent report. 

“If a pandemic can provoke such a rapid and far-reaching response, at scale, surely the world can muster the necessary will to act with similar decisiveness and urgency in response to the climate crisis?”

“The $100 billion target therefore needs to be seen as a floor and not as a ceiling,” the added.

Former Maldives president Mohamed Nasheed, representing the Climate Vulnerable Forum of 48 countries home to a billion people, said financing should be broadened to include sovereign debt relief.

“We are so threatened that we might not have an island or a country much longer, so it’s hardly possible for us to pay the debt if we are not around,” he said.  

“Is it not then reasonable for climate vulnerable countries to call upon debt holders to restructure their debt?”, he added, saying he would be taking this proposal to the Glasgow talks.

– Symbols of justice –

The $100 billion figure — earmarked for emissions reduction and preparing for future climate impact — has become a symbol of the perceived need for “climate justice”, many observers point out.

The failure of rich nations to honour their pledge is especially galling in light of a separate track in the negotiations over “loss and damage”, meant to cover the costs of climate-enhanced damages that have already occurred.

“The people and communities the least responsible for the rise in global emissions are facing the worst of the climate crisis right now,” said Vanessa Nakate, a young climate activist from Uganda.

 bur-so/mh/pvh

Global momentum is building on the climate crisis but action will be impossible without two nations, China and the United States, which together account for more than half of emissions — and whose governments don’t get along.

Ahead of the COP26 summit in Glasgow, experts believe that breakthrough US-China cooperation could be the catalyst for a historic agreement on climate change — but also that frosty ties between Washington and Beijing are not, so to speak, the end of the world.

Both nations have stepped up efforts to curb emissions, although analysts say that actions are far too modest to meet a UN-backed goal of keeping the planet’s temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.6 degrees Fahrenheit) and avoiding the worst effects of climate change.

“If the national governments of China and the US are not able to agree on anything of substance, I think there may well be room for serious action anyway, because both countries are able and willing to do a lot on their own,” said Mary Nichols, who led major climate initiatives as chair of the California Air Resources Board.

“But that doesn’t mean that it’s irrelevant,” she said. “Without an explicit agreement, other countries will be reluctant to act.”

US President Joe Biden’s administration has described Beijing as his country’s top long-term challenge and raised pressure on concerns from human rights to Taiwan to trade but has sought engagement on climate.

“It is not a mystery that China and the US have many differences. But on climate, cooperation — it is the only way to break free from the world’s current mutual suicide pact,” John Kerry, the US climate envoy, said in a recent speech.

– ‘Race to top’? –

Kerry has traveled twice to China despite a chill in relations. But on his latest visit, Foreign Minister Wang Yi issued a warning.

“It is impossible for China-US climate cooperation to be elevated above the overall environment of China-US relations,” Wang said.

The remarks raised concern in Washington that the Biden-Kerry approach could backfire, allowing China to use climate as leverage.

But Chinese President Xi Jinping soon afterward took a major step by telling the United Nations that Beijing would stop funding coal in its overseas infrastructure-building blitz, although it is still investing at home in the dirty but politically sensitive form of energy.

Alex Wang, faculty co-director of the Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the University of California, Los Angeles, said that China and the United States could engage in a “race to the top” on who does more.

“It improves China’s global reputation to appear as a positive actor on climate,” Wang said.

“If the leaders in China feel like they are becoming laggards, I think it would lead to some pressure to act further, and it would be a reason to disregard the voices from fossil fuel industries or coal industry within the country,” he said.

“But without the pressure then the balance shifts in favor of slower action.”

He drew a contrast with Biden’s predecessor Donald Trump, whose climate skepticism meant little pressure on Beijing to tackle coal.

– Potentially powerful steps –

Nichols, who helped design California’s cap-and-trade program that creates a market with incentives for reducing emissions, said one major step would be if China agreed to link efforts to set a common price on carbon.

“That would, I think, send an extraordinarily strong signal to investors and businesses around the world,” said Nichols, now a fellow at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy.

California already has linked its market to Quebec, taking a lead in action even before Biden’s election.

With so many areas of tension between the United States and China, a multilateral process such as COP26 may be more effective in any case than bilateral talks, said Jacob Stokes, a fellow at the Center for a New American Security.

“Neither side wants to be seen as doing this as some sort of favor to the other side,” he said.

And with China already the world’s second-largest economy, Stokes said that US policymakers may want to focus climate diplomacy on poorer nations.

“Is it more important to expend effort to get concessions from Beijing or to try to finance expansion of clean power in the rest of the developing world that still has a lot more energy-intensive development to do?” 

Blue Origin announced Sunday it was delaying an upcoming flight set to carry actor William Shatner to space due to anticipated winds.

Shatner, who played Captain James T. Kirk in the cult classic TV series “Star Trek,” is due to become the first member of the iconic show’s cast to journey to the final frontier as a guest aboard a Blue Origin suborbital rocket. 

His history-making flight was scheduled for October 12.

But “due to forecasted winds on Tuesday, October 12, Blue Origin’s mission operations team has made the decision to delay the launch of NS-18 and is now targeting Wednesday, October 13,” a spokeswoman said in a statement.

The new flight is scheduled for 8:30 am (1330 GMT).

Shatner, 90, will be the oldest person ever to go to space. 

His trip will take him and the NS-18 rocket crew just beyond the Karman line, 62 miles (100 kilometers) high, where they will experience four minutes of weightlessness and gaze out at the curvature of the planet.

Blue Origin’s decision to invite one of the most recognizable galaxy-faring characters from science fiction for its second crewed flight has helped maintain excitement around the nascent space tourism sector.

For fans, the 10-minute hop from a West Texas base back to Earth will be a fitting coda for a pop culture phenomenon that inspired generations of astronauts.

Blue Origin announced Sunday it was delaying an upcoming flight set to carry actor William Shatner to space due to anticipated winds.

Shatner, who played Captain James T. Kirk in the cult classic TV series “Star Trek,” is due to become the first member of the iconic show’s cast to journey to the final frontier as a guest aboard a Blue Origin suborbital rocket. 

His history-making flight was scheduled for October 12.

But “due to forecasted winds on Tuesday, October 12, Blue Origin’s mission operations team has made the decision to delay the launch of NS-18 and is now targeting Wednesday, October 13,” a spokeswoman said in a statement.

The new flight is scheduled for 8:30 am (1330 GMT).

Shatner, 90, will be the oldest person ever to go to space. 

His trip will take him and the NS-18 rocket crew just beyond the Karman line, 62 miles (100 kilometers) high, where they will experience four minutes of weightlessness and gaze out at the curvature of the planet.

Blue Origin’s decision to invite one of the most recognizable galaxy-faring characters from science fiction for its second crewed flight has helped maintain excitement around the nascent space tourism sector.

For fans, the 10-minute hop from a West Texas base back to Earth will be a fitting coda for a pop culture phenomenon that inspired generations of astronauts.