China will “aim to have CO2 emissions peak before 2030 and achieve carbon neutrality before 2060,” President Xi Jinping announced during his address to the UN General Assembly Tuesday. The announcement marks a major shift for the country, which still relies heavily on coal for electricity generation, and puts “puts a lot more pressure on the United States” to enact its own timeline to achieve carbon neutrality, MIT management professor John Sterman, who models and tracks emission reductions and pledges at Climate Interactive, told the AP. Though China is by far the world’s biggest annual emitter of greenhouse gas pollution, its per-capita and cumulative historic emissions remain far lower than the United States. “You can’t get to 2060 without going through 2030,” David Waskow, director of the International Climate Initiative at the World Resources Institute, told Bloomberg. But if the world needs to eliminate carbon emissions by 2050, “some developed countries would need to get there sooner than 2050 in order to balance things out.” (AP, Bloomberg $, New York Times $, The Guardian, Politico Pro $, The Hill, Climate Home, FT $, Earther)