A joint China-U.S. declaration on climate change is a political reset to a time when the world's two biggest carbon emitters reached the brief meeting of minds that helped forge the 2015 Paris Agreement.
But that still won't be enough to avert a deepening climate crisis, unless Washington and Beijing can match words with more action to curb fossil fuels and prod others at the COP26 talks in Glasgow to do the same.
"It prevents the worst from happening," said Li Shuo, senior climate analyst with Greenpeace in Beijing, hinting at a scenario under which the United States and China might refuse to cooperate in the fight against climate change. "But does it give us the best? The answer is clearly no."
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