That left a huge gap. The world\u2019s two top-polluting countries had for many years set the course for the rest of the world \u2014 albeit at a pace far too slow to avoid warming the planet to catastrophic levels.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Even in the hours before its leaders were to meet Chinese President Xi Jinping on Thursday, there was no guarantee of a deal. But on Wednesday afternoon EU diplomats were told the statement would go ahead, according to two of those informed, who were granted anonymity in order to discuss the talks.<\/p>\n
If an agreement comes, there\u2019s no certainty it will be meaningful.<\/p>\n
Regardless, experts say a joint statement between the leaders of the EU and China, being floated for Thursday\u2019s summit, could be a much-needed boost for jittery clean energy markets and give political confidence to other nations\u2019 governments to further cut their own emissions.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is a moment the EU and China cannot afford to miss,\u201d said Ireland\u2019s former President Mary Robinson, a prominent voice in climate diplomacy. \u201cEU-China climate cooperation can help steady markets, accelerate the clean energy transition and show that even in a moment of division, climate action remains one of the surest paths to resilience.\u201d<\/p>\n
On Thursday, Ursula von der Leyen and Ant\u00f3nio Costa, presidents of the European Commission and European Council \u2014\u00a0which writes the bloc\u2019s legislation and represents the national leaders, respectively \u2014\u00a0will meet Xi and Premier Li Qiang in Beijing for talks including on security, economics and trade.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"That left a huge gap. The world\u2019s two top-polluting countries had for many years set the course for…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":286090,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5174],"tags":[11783,521,6904,11078,2813,26258,1395,95661,3854,1442,71617,5293,1305,5398,35,3057,2000,299,5187,7159,5435,4175,106922,17792,46,856,1217,5442,8720,1201,49,1220,1773],"class_list":{"0":"post-286089","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-eu","8":"tag-antonio-costa","9":"tag-asia","10":"tag-barack-obama","11":"tag-batteries","12":"tag-carbon","13":"tag-carbon-border-tax","14":"tag-china","15":"tag-climate-diplomacy","16":"tag-coal","17":"tag-competition","18":"tag-cop30","19":"tag-diplomacy","20":"tag-electric-vehicles","21":"tag-emissions","22":"tag-energy","23":"tag-energy-markets","24":"tag-eu","25":"tag-europe","26":"tag-european","27":"tag-fossil-fuels","28":"tag-gas","29":"tag-greenhouse-gas-emissions","30":"tag-mary-robinson","31":"tag-paris-climate-agreement","32":"tag-policy","33":"tag-pollution","34":"tag-protectionism","35":"tag-renewable-energy","36":"tag-resilience","37":"tag-trade","38":"tag-united-states","39":"tag-ursula-von-der-leyen","40":"tag-xi-jinping"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":"Validation failed: Text character limit of 500 exceeded"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/286089","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=286089"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/286089\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/286090"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=286089"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=286089"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=286089"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}