Kerry: China is ‘not doing enough’ on climate 

Special climate envoy John Kerry said Friday night that China isn’t doing enough on climate change after the country said at a White House climate summit this week that it would try to reduce its coal use starting in a few years.

After acknowledging some of the promises Chinese President Xi Jinping made, Kerry argued during a CNN town hall that the country is “not doing enough.”

“They have a massive coal dependency. We have to try to get them to move further and we have to also ask China not to be funding the building of new coal-fired power plants in other parts of the world,” he said.

China, during the White House event this week, said it would “strictly limit” its increase in coal consumption through 2025 and start to “phase it down” starting in 2026. 

Xi also said that the country plans to “strictly control” coal-fired power plant projects.

However, unlike countries such as the U.S. that will seek to reduce their greenhouse emissions over the course of the next decade, China said that it expects its emissions to peak in 2030. 

China is the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter and the U.S. is the second-largest.