China’s envoy to global negotiations on climate change expressed optimism on Wednesday that a new agreement to reduce greenhouse gases would be reached this year, and he said that his nation’s efforts to curb carbon pollution already had produced results that he called “second to none.”
But the envoy, Yu Qingtai, also underscored China’s opposition to placing a ceiling on its emissions of greenhouse gases, a step that some experts have called crucial to efforts to slow global warming.
China passed the United States a few years ago as the world’s largest emitter of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas produced by human activity, although it remains well behind when pollutants are measured on a per-person basis. Together, China and the United States account for about 40 percent of pollutants linked to climate change.