“I think the idea of holding climate hostage to a particular country’s priority on some totally separate issue is not the height of responsibility,” Sullivan told reporters on the plane to India for the Group of 20 nations summit.
“We have a climate crisis” and “it should not be a source of leverage,” he said. “It should be a source of urgency for countries to actually come to the table and try and solve it.”
Sullivan was responding to a Bloomberg News report that China had raised the issue of improved access to semiconductors in international discussions over progress on tackling climate change in the run-up to the G-20.
Chinese officials brought up the prospect of developed countries delivering more financing and technology — including chips — to aid efforts to combat global warming, according to people familiar with the summit preparations. All asked not to be named discussing negotiations that are ongoing and private.
Fraught talks
“I’ve said many times that the PRC’s effort to link climate to America’s actions on other issues is not a game we are going to play, and that’s true in the G-20 context as well,” Sullivan said, referring to China’s formal name, the People’s Republic of China.China’s Foreign Ministry didn’t respond to questions. Negotiations on climate action are among the most fraught in the run-up to this weekend’s meeting in New Delhi, which Chinese President Xi Jinping has opted to skip amid tensions with both India and the US.
Xi’s administration has repeatedly condemned US moves to tighten export controls on leading-edge chip technology to China on national security grounds, saying it amounts to containment of the world’s second-largest economy. China’s gambit in talks with G-20 counterparts, including the US and other chip powers such as Japan and South Korea, suggests that those restrictions are hurting.
Efforts to roll back restrictions on access to chips and chipmaking technology are highly unlikely to succeed, not least because revelations that Chinese tech giant Huawei Technologies Co. produced a smartphone with an advanced processor at its core have prompted concern in Washington that the existing controls are not stringent enough. All the same, China may simply have raised the issue to highlight its complaints.
Chips are used in applications that are required to speed the energy transition, such as electric vehicles and wind turbines. In an April speech outlining US industrial policy and Washington’s competition with China, Sullivan warned that “clean-energy supply chains are at risk of being weaponized,” similarly to oil in the 1970s.
