The commitment by China’s president Xi Jinping to make his country — by far the world’s biggest carbon emitter — carbon neutral by 2060 is an extremely important shift. With China’s emissions now accounting for 28 per cent of the world’s total, there is no global solution to global warming without China. Until now Beijing had insisted that it should, because of its status as an emerging market, be given more leeway than the US and other industrialised nations in global climate accords such as the Paris Agreement. These are aimed at keeping the global temperature rise well below 2 degrees centigrade from pre-industrial times, and preferably to just 1.5 degrees.
Beijing had previously avoided setting a date for carbon neutrality, instead promising only that emissions would begin to decline after around 2030. Some will view Mr Xi’s declaration of a 2060 date, made to the UN General Assembly on Tuesday, as canny political posturing — making Donald Trump, who is pulling the US out of the Paris Agreement, look all the more isolated on the international stage. That may well be the case. Yet it is also true that Beijing’s shift will place pressure on laggards such as the US — the world’s second biggest carbon emitter — to join the dozens of countries that have now set net zero or carbon neutral targets.
India, which is set to rival China in CO2 emissions in the coming decades, and other emerging markets will also face more intense international pressure to green their economies in light of China's pledge. Even if that pressure yields little in the way of fresh commitments, the Climate Action Tracker, the independent research body, thinks China’s step alone will lower global warming projections by around 0.2 to 0.3 degrees Celsius — the biggest dip since 2015. Beijing has also sent a clear signal to oil, coal and gas exporters that one of their biggest markets may need less of their fuel in future — potentially speeding up the decline of fossil fuels.