PLEA Network

13 September 2018, Climate Home News. Let down by Trump on climate, China goes around him in California. In downtown San Francisco, the fifth floor of the Four Seasons hotel has been transformed into a Chinese diplomatic outpost. Translators and staffers chat excitedly in the corridors; the great and the good of global climate governance appear one by one; and behind doors that swing open and then quickly closed, officials from the superpower and the Californian government cut climate deals that fly in the face of White House policy. California governor Jerry Brown’s Global Climate Action Summit, which is being held just a block away, has long been anticipated as a domestic riposte to the Trump administration’s climate reverse. On Wednesday US cities, states and businesses released a report detailing how they were upholding the US side of the Paris bargain, in spite of the White House. And the Chinese are making their own statement in San Francisco. More than fifty Chinese officials, academics and business leaders are listed on a three day programme of events. With their staff, the Chinese are one of the most significant non-US presences at the summit. In remarks to a room filled to standing at the back, Brown thanked the “very large Chinese delegation”, which included Xie Zhenhua, China’s long-standing climate majordomo and the top official in the delegation. “Just the fact that you are here, in such numbers, and people of such importance and expertise says volumes about the commitment of China to confronting climate change,” he said. In 2015, Chinese and US presidents Xi Jinping and Barack Obama signed a bilateral deal that set their targets for emissions curbs and laid the foundation for the Paris Agreement. Few people outside those governments understand better than Laurence Tubiana how difficult it was to hold the US-China compact together in the final days of talks in Paris. On Wednesday, the former French diplomat, now head of the European Climate Foundation, watched as Brown and Xie signed multiple cooperation deals on research, industry and climate politics. Read more here