Various media have reported this week that Biden climate envoy John Kerry will return to China next week for more meetings preparatory to the UN COP26 confab in Glasgow on Nov. 1-12. His trip has not been confirmed from the Chinese side, with Chinese Foreign Ministry press spokesman Zhao Lijian responding on Aug. 27 that he didn’t “have anything to offer at the moment.”
Western sources cited by the Wall Street Journal, Reuters, etc. (the usual “people familiar with the matter") all report that Kerry wants to get China to agree to two measures, before the Glasgow summit: to officially declare a blanket moratorium on all financing of international coal-fired projects, and to move up its target dates for “net zero emissions.” Much-cited is Kerry’s glassy-eyed threat in a July 20 speech at the Royal Botanical Gardens in London that “if China sticks with its current plan and does not peak its emissions until 2030, then the entire rest of the world would have to go to [net] zero—zero!—by 2040 or even 2035” to have any hope of avoiding climate catastrophe.
