BEIJING (Reuters) -The EU climate chief’s criticism of China’s new climate pledges shows “double standards and selective blindness,” China’s foreign ministry said on Friday, accusing the bloc of being slow to act on its own climate targets.
China earlier this week pledged to cut greenhouse gas emissions by between 7% and 10% by 2035 from the peak as part of its new nationally determined contributions (NDCs) targets. The European Union’s Climate Commissioner Wopke Hoekstra called the target “clearly disappointing”.
A day earlier, U.S. President Donald Trump described climate change as “the greatest con job” in an address to the United Nations General Assembly, a statement the Chinese foreign ministry appeared to allude to without addressing directly.
“Some people turn a deaf ear and remain silent when hearing claims like ‘climate change is a hoax,’ but instead ignore and make irresponsible comments about China’s responsible and proactive actions to address climate change,” a spokesperson for the ministry said in a written response to Hoekstra’s comment.
Hoekstra said China’s new climate plan fell “well short of what we believe is both achievable and necessary”. He also called the United States’s climate approach “concerning and problematic”, the New York Times reported on Wednesday.
CHINA CALLS FOR MORE COOPERATION
“Such rhetoric disrupts global solidarity in addressing climate change and undermines the atmosphere of cooperation —that is what is truly ‘disappointing’,” said the statement sent to Reuters.
NDCs are non-binding national climate plans that should be submitted every five years to the UN as part of the Paris Agreement, a 2015 pact aiming to keep global temperatures from rising beyond 1.5 degrees Celsius.
The United States, the second-biggest greenhouse gas emitter after China, submitted its withdrawal from the Paris Agreement for a second time after Trump took office in January.
The EU has not announced its new climate plan, months after an initial February deadline, although it had agreed to set a target for cutting emissions by somewhere between 66.25% and 72.5% by 2035 from 1990 levels.
In its statement, China’s foreign ministry called on the EU to change what it said was its habit of talking loud but acting small.
The ministry also said China was the country with “the most resolute will, the most forceful actions and the most effective implementation of its emission reduction commitments”.
China’s new climate targets mark the first time it pledged to reduce emissions, but the pledged reduction rate was far less than the 30% cut by 2035 that some scientists had said was needed to align China with the globally-agreed goal to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius.
The European Commission said in October that the EU’s greenhouse gas emissions fell by 8.3% in 2023 compared with the previous year, and were 37% down from 1990 levels versus a 68% GDP growth.
(Reporting by Yukun Zhang in Beijing and Kate Abnett in Brussels; editing by Philippa Fletcher)
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