The world’s biggest carbon emitter is expected to announce plans to finally implement a program to put a price on pollution. At the White House on Friday, Chinese President Xi Jinping is expected to introduce a long-awaited national cap-and-trade program to be implemented in the country in 2017.

According to The New York Times, the announcement will happen during a meeting at the White House with President Obama. The move, which has been expected for over a year, is the latest in a series of cooperative ones aimed at tackling climate change made by both leaders in tandem.

Cap-and-trade programs, as they are informally known, are systems in which governments set limits on the amount of pollution that a company or industry can produce. If a company must exceed that limit to do business, it must also buy permits from other companies, theoretically triggering a “race to the bottom” for emissions and incentivizing cleaner technologies. There has been some debate over the scheme in the past, but the system is generally considered one of the best market-based ways to mitigate emissions.

The move could reverberate in the U.S., where political interests have for a long time stalled serious action on climate change. One of the main tenets of the Republican party’s opposition to carbon regulations has been the fact that China, the only emitter worse than the U.S., continues to pollute. But now, says the White House, that argument holds less weight, said officials on a conference call of reporters:

“One of the arguments that has been proffered against the United States stepping up and providing more resources to help poor countries develop in low-carbon ways has been that if the United States steps up with resources, then other countries won’t–the sort of argument that if the US leads, then others will just take a backseat.”

And with Beijing looking like this on a daily basis, the move to restrict emissions is coming not a moment too soon.

[Image via AP Images]