Explained: What does the US-China disagreement mean for climate change? 

Concern has been raised by China's decision to stop working with the US on the climate catastrophe, and seasoned climate diplomats are calling for a quick restart of negotiations to help prevent worsening global warming.

Beijing revealed a number of actions on Friday in response to Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the US House of Representatives, visiting Taiwan, which it called a "egregious provocation." China, which claims Taiwan as part of its territory and has conducted extensive military drills close to the island, has announced that it will no longer cooperate with the US on important matters like climate change.

With only a few months until the pivotal UN Cop27 in Egypt this fall, China's exit from climate negotiations—the amount of which is still unclear—threatens to undermine the already precarious cooperation between the world's two greatest carbon emitters. Without robust action from the US and China, which together account for nearly 40% of the world's greenhouse gas emissions, experts say there is little chance of preventing catastrophic global warming.

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A summer of climate change-related calamities, including record heatwaves and wildfires sweeping the US and Europe, punishingly high temperatures sweltering India and China, and disastrous flooding plaguing the US, south Asia, and Africa, has contributed to the breakdown in relations.

The US is about to enact historic climate legislation at home, but the world's nations as a whole are still not doing enough to prevent exceeding set temperature goals. António Guterres, the UN secretary-general, warned last month that the objective of keeping warming to 1.5C is "on life support" and that its pulse is deteriorating.

“US-China relations have always been a rollercoaster and we often witness flare-ups, but while you can freeze talks, you cannot freeze climate impacts,” said Laurence Tubiana, chief executive of the European Climate Foundation and a key architect of the Paris climate accords for the Guardian.

“It’s in the self-interest of China and the US to act on climate and start talking. Indeed, China recognizes its own self-interest to act; it is still committed to Paris and is moving forward on domestic pledges around methane and coal phasedown.”

At various moments in recent years, the US and China have accused one another of failing to do enough to reduce emissions that contribute to global warming. When then-president Donald Trump repealed a number of environmental regulations in 2017, China criticised the US for its "selfishness," and Joe Biden, Trump's successor, said last year that Chinese president Xi Jinping had made a "huge mistake" by skipping the Cop26 climate summit in Scotland.

However, at the same negotiations in Glasgow in November, the two countries made progress when they decided on a surprise plan to collaborate "with urgency" on reducing emissions. The delegation leader for China, Xie Zhenhua, stated that both nations must "accelerate a green and low carbon transition." The US climate envoy, John Kerry, acknowledged that there was "no shortage of differences" between the countries but insisted that "cooperation is the only way to get this work done." This is a discussion of physics and science.

According to Nate Hultman, a former Kerry adviser who is now the director of the Center for Global Sustainability at the University of Maryland, this rapprochement on climate has aided in fostering partnership between US and Chinese organisations as well as offering leadership to other nations.

According to Hultman, "the US and China cooperating is a crucial facet of addressing climate change; it has the ability to inspire others to do more."

"The overall relationship is quite complicated, but both nations recognise that this issue has a global component in addition to a bilateral one. I'm hoping that will reunite them once more. Hopefully this break won't last long, and they'll be able to resume negotiations as soon as possible.

High-level climate negotiations may now be scaled back, according to Hultman, but other bilateral cooperation may continue despite the lack of information at this time. He argued that the Cop27 discussions in Egypt may still result in progress, regardless of the state of relations between the US and China.

“This has been challenging and at times we are going to stall out,” Hultman said. “But Cop27 won’t just crash out if the US and China don’t iron out their differences. We would have to focus on what else can be done as an international community.”

(With inputs from the Guardian)