This week, as the rest of Washington was caught up in the dramatic shake-up in the 2024 U.S. presidential race, the Biden administration’s climate change team was rolling up its sleeves for a final few months of tough climate diplomacy. At a White House summit on Tuesday, officials put the spotlight on an often overlooked climate problem: super-pollutants. At the event, administration officials and industry leaders unveiled a series of new actions to monitor and cut these potent non-carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, taking aim at what has been called “the other half of global warming.”
This week, as the rest of Washington was caught up in the dramatic shake-up in the 2024 U.S. presidential race, the Biden administration’s climate change team was rolling up its sleeves for a final few months of tough climate diplomacy. At a White House summit on Tuesday, officials put the spotlight on an often overlooked climate problem: super-pollutants. At the event, administration officials and industry leaders unveiled a series of new actions to monitor and cut these potent non-carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, taking aim at what has been called “the other half of global warming.”
The announcements included a significant commitment: U.S. companies that emit nitrous oxide (N2O), a super-pollutant 273 times more powerful than carbon dioxide, will voluntarily cut their emissions, reducing overall U.S. industrial N2O emissions more than 50 percent from 2020 levels by early next year.
But for the super-pollutant campaign to really be a success, U.S. officials know they’ll have to take their show on the road.
At a summit side event on Tuesday, John Podesta, the senior advisor to the president on international climate policy, announced that he would be traveling to China to continue negotiations with China’s special envoy for climate change, Liu Zhenmin, who visited Washington in May. Rick Duke, the U.S. deputy special envoy for climate, will be making a separate trip to China as well. A State Department official told Foreign Policy that the trips will occur in a “few weeks.”
High on Podesta’s agenda: getting China to join the United States in taking action on nitrous oxide. Eliminating N2O emissions involves installing incinerators at industrial plants, and because the technology has long been in use, it is one of the cheapest ways to reduce emissions. Given the low cost, cutting nitrous oxide and other super-pollutant emissions is a “core component of U.S. engagement with China on climate,” Podesta said at the side event, co-hosted by Climate Advisers, the Asia Society Policy Institute, and the Institute for Governance & Sustainable Development.
Together, the two countries produce two-thirds of global adipic acid, an ingredient used to make nylon that is a major source of industrial N2O emissions. And by one estimate, China is responsible for 94 percent of N2O emissions from the acid.
“We have a lot to be proud of in tackling non-CO2 greenhouse gas emissions domestically, but we can make the biggest difference by leveraging domestic action to catalyze more progress, and to do that, we need to focus on China,” Podesta said.
Podesta’s trip will come at a tricky moment in an already precarious era of U.S.-China climate diplomacy. Both sides may only have a few months left to make headway in negotiations, because if former U.S. President Donald Trump is reelected and takes office in January, any such climate talks would almost certainly come to a screeching halt. A Trump campaign spokesperson told Politico that if he won, Trump would once again withdraw the United States from the 2015 Paris Agreement and may even attempt to withdraw the country from the underlying United Nations climate convention.
Even for Democrats, climate progress with China is increasingly mired in the clean-technology trade battle. For instance, Washington applied a 100 percent tariff to Chinese electric vehicles in May.
Despite these tensions, the United States and China have made some headway on climate change together during the Biden administration. Through intensive diplomacy between the two countries’ former special climate envoys—John Kerry and Xie Zhenhua—both sides agreed to reduce potent methane emissions and, in last November’s Sunnylands Statement, to cooperate on reducing N2O emissions. The statement also featured a critical commitment from China to include all greenhouse gasses in its upcoming Paris targets, scheduled to be submitted early next year. Ongoing work on these items has been carried out in four bilateral working groups launched after Sunnylands.
In the final few months of the Biden administration, U.S. officials are hoping to build off that momentum. One major focus from both sides is likely to be gaming out how ambitious they’ll be in their new Paris targets, which will set goals for 2035—a critical midway point to carbon neutrality.
“I think the U.S. side will have expectations on what the Chinese numbers should be,” said Li Shuo, the director of the China Climate Hub at the Asia Society Policy Institute. “And of course, China will also have questions on the U.S. targets, including whether the U.S. will be able to deliver its previously made commitment in light of the election in November,” he added, referring to the U.S. Paris targets for 2030.
But nitrous oxide might be the most likely area to yield concrete progress in the forthcoming talks, Li said. “We are committed through the process of followthrough on the Sunnylands Statement to make sure that this stays high on the agenda and that we do everything we can together as well as at home to tackle this very low-cost, very real, very quick fast-cooling strategy,” Duke, the deputy climate envoy, said at the summit side event.
Some Chinese adipic acid producers previously abated their emissions under the 1997 Kyoto Protocol climate agreement, which created a market for projects in developing countries to earn lucrative credits for cutting their emissions. But once those incentives ended in 2012, evidence suggests that most of the Chinese companies stopped abating. The Chinese government does not currently regulate N2O emissions.
One creative approach to incentivize action in China that was highlighted at the summit side event came from a U.S. company, ClimeCo, which announced new deals to install abatement equipment at Chinese adipic acid plants and sell the emissions credits in the voluntary carbon market. ClimeCo is already doing the same thing in the United States, by playing a role in helping the country to reduce its industrial N2O emissions by 50 percent.
Some environmental advocates have been critical of voluntary credits, pointing to issues that cropped up with the Kyoto Protocol’s offsets in China, where companies increased emissions to make more money from selling carbon offsets. The U.S. officials at the event said stringent rules for carbon markets are essential and that such credits could be a complement to regulation.
While the United States itself lacks regulation on N2O emissions, officials said they are hoping the new voluntary actions from U.S. corporations, packaged at the White House summit, can catalyze China to act. “It’s a timely moment for us to have done this a few weeks ahead of their trips for them to point to and say, ‘Just a few weeks ago, we have been taking steps on industrial N2O emissions,’” said a State Department official, referring to Duke’s and Podesta’s upcoming trips to China. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on the record.
In a time of divineness and low trust, it’s a strategy that, while imperfect, may convince China to move forward, as it did by releasing its own methane plan after the United States announced a global coalition to cut methane emissions.
“It’s not often that we find ourselves with an affordable and relatively straightforward way to eliminate emissions equivalent to tens of millions of cars on the road,” Podesta said. “Cutting industrial nitrous oxide pollution is that opportunity, so I think we need to seize it together.”
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