Joe Biden won’t be satisfied with China’s huge, new climate change pledge, allies say, and is poised to increase pressure on Beijing not just for its trade practices and military provocations but also for its world-leading carbon emissions.
“Biden will confront China because it’s necessary policy and it’s great domestic politics,” said Paul Bledsoe, a former climate adviser in the Clinton administration affiliated with Clean Energy for Biden, a group raising money for the Democratic nominee.
President Xi Jinping, in a surprise announcement last week, pledged that China would reach carbon neutrality by 2060. He did not define the pledge specifically, but carbon neutrality generally means balancing emissions with measures that take emissions out of the atmosphere.
China’s pledge, assuming it were implemented, could make a major dent in global emissions. China produces 29% of global emissions, more than the United States and the European Union, the next biggest emitters, combined.
But Biden, if elected president, is unlikely to back down from harsh rhetoric he’s used during the campaign against Beijing for its support of fossil fuels at home and abroad. He has not commented directly on China’s pledge since it was announced, and his campaign did not respond to a request for information, but advisers aligned with Democrats expect him to adopt an aggressive stance.
“Biden has been absolutely clear going back to his first climate plan and then through the primaries, criticizing where China was domestically with emissions, but also internationally with development policy,” said Andrew Light, a climate negotiator under President Barack Obama.
China’s commitment includes plenty of holes, giving Biden room to push for more.
In the short term, China pledged to ensure its emissions peak “before” 2030, but it does not chart a course to get there.
China is home to more than half of the globe’s operating coal plants and is still building new ones.
“China’s 2060 goal is important, but the pledge must be accompanied by ambitious, short-term measures to limit emissions to be meaningful,” said David Sandalow, a former under secretary of Energy in the Obama administration.
Bledsoe said China, the leading producer of renewable technologies, should be pledging to reduce emissions this decade, not just stop growing them.
“This is an attempt to mollify Biden, but I don’t think it’s going to work because he has to force them to cut far more quickly than they are proposing,” Bledsoe said.
Beijing’s new commitment is also silent on its Belt and Road initiative, China’s global development program that has significantly funded fossil fuel infrastructure projects overseas.
In his official climate plan, Biden warns China against “gaming the system by becoming destination economies for polluters, undermining our climate efforts and exploiting American workers and businesses.”
He also vows to make future bilateral U.S.-China trade agreements contingent on Beijing meeting its climate commitments and ending financing of coal projects through Belt and Road.
Sandalow suggested Biden has other reasons to challenge China. The U.S.-China relationship has become more confrontational since the countries reached an agreement on combating climate change during the Obama years, helping pave the way for the global Paris agreement.
Now, there is bipartisan concern about Beijing’s behavior in other arenas, such as its crackdown on democracy in Hong Kong, escalation of tensions in the South China Sea, and intellectual trade theft.
“VP Biden will be far more strategic and less responsive to personal flattery by Chinese leaders than President Trump,” said Sandalow, a China expert at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy. “Concerns with respect to China’s policies on a range of issues are shared broadly on a bipartisan basis in the U.S.”
Light says Biden would have leverage over China, given his commitments for the U.S. to reduce emissions dramatically.
Biden has pledged for the U.S. to reach net-zero emissions by 2050 and produce carbon-free electricity by 2035.
“Biden’s response is going to be, ‘Look, the Chinese have made a commitment to the world stage. Who will make sure they live up to that?’ It’s not going to be the Trump administration,” Light said.
Biden, however, would face his own challenges in proving U.S. climate commitments have teeth.
The U.S. remains far away from reaching its Paris target of reducing emissions 26% to 28% below 2005 levels by 2025. Trump rejected the agreement but can’t officially leave it until November, the day after the election.
Biden has promised to rejoin the Paris agreement on “day one” of his presidency.
He’s expected to submit an updated target on reducing emissions out to 2030 ahead of the next United Nations climate conference in Glasgow, United Kingdom, in November 2021, said Alden Meyer, director of strategy and policy for the Union of Concerned Scientists.
“The question is, what would the 2030 commitment look like under Biden and how credible would it be with international partners given the difficulty we’ve had in meeting the 2025 target?” said Meyer, who has attended global climate negotiations since they first started in 1991.
Biden, meanwhile, could have trouble implementing his agenda through Congress, although he has promised to use executive authorities to undo Trump’s regulatory rollbacks.
“China’s new commitment pressures the Biden administration to start running as soon into the hit ground,” said Jane Nakano, senior fellow in the Energy and National Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
The stakes are huge for the U.S. and China. The EU recently committed, by law, to reach net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, and it is looking to cut emissions by 55% by 2030. It has also pledged to tax imports of carbon-intensive goods, which would be costly to big exporters such as the U.S. and China. That threat reportedly influenced China to pursue carbon neutrality.
Biden has similarly promised to impose a “border carbon adjustment” tax on exporters to the U.S., but such a move would be unworkable unless Congress passes policies to curb emissions, experts say.
“The climate game is really about the U.S. and China,” Bledsoe said. “We are wrapped in this climate death struggle, and we both need to make progress.”
