I t was a bad week for anyone who thought China would cooperate on emissions reduction. President Xi Jinping reiterated that his country would set its own path on the issue and not be influenced by outside factors, according to the Washington Post and Bloomberg. This contradicts Xi’s 2015 Paris Agreement pledges to reduce its carbon emissions at the latest after 2030.

Xi’s remarks came while climate envoy and former secretary of state John Kerry was visiting Beijing to reopen a dialogue. This was shortly after Secretary of State Antony Blinken arrived, and just before former secretary of state Henry Kissinger, the architect of opening China to the West 50 years ago, came for a visit.

The clear signals from China are a deliberate slap in the face to America and provide a rationale for a bill sponsored by Representative Chip Roy (R., Texas) to defund Kerry’s climate-change office at the State Department. The bill is cosponsored by over two dozen other House Republicans.

This should not be news, because Xi gave the same message last fall. In October 2022, he said that China would not abandon coal-fired power plants before renewables could substitute for the lost fossil fuel. But this substitution will not occur because fossil fuels generate substantially more energy than renewables.

It was a bad week for anyone who thought China would cooperate on emissions reduction. President Xi Jinping reiterated that his country would set its own path on the issue and not be influenced by outside factors