Slinging mud at China does no good to global climate governance, delegates to the COP28 climate conference have said, referring to China as a champion in developing renewable energy that has made remarkable progress in green transformation and made significant contributions to the world.
During COP28, or the 28th session of the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), some Western politicians fabricated the rhetoric indicating that "China's per capita carbon dioxide emissions rank second in the world."
Statistics have dismissed such baseless blame as ridiculous, said Xu Huaqing, director of China's National Centre for Climate Change Strategy and International Cooperation.
It is a global consensus that developed countries have caused the major part of global warming. The Sixth Assessment Report of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change revealed that 58 percent of the global warming since the Industrial Revolution was caused by pre-1990 human activities.
Even today, per capita carbon dioxide emissions of developed countries remain much higher than those of developing countries.
"Even at present, in per capita terms, carbon emission of the United States is still many times higher than that of some Asian and African countries," Erik Solheim, former UN under-secretary-general and former executive director of the UN Environment Programme, has told Xinhua in a recent interview.
Given their carbon emissions history, the rich developed countries are emitters that have produced the major part of greenhouse gases, Solheim said, urging those countries to take up their climate responsibilities and offer more help to developing nations.
Blaming China, especially based on misinformation, is wrong and will do no good to global climate governance, said delegates to the climate conference on the theme of "Unite, Act, Deliver."
"Blaming is not helpful to advance our common agenda. We should really focus on seeing results happen," Daniele Violetti, senior director at the UNFCCC, told Xinhua.
He stressed that climate governance is a multilateral process and everybody has a role to play. "So I don't think listening to voices of blaming has any help to the process," Violetti said.
"China can't be blamed. Pointing fingers at each other is never going to work. Let's just work together," said Malawian Minister of Energy Ibrahim Matola.
(Cover image via VCG）