While American climate advocates are still taking victory laps over the historic clean energy bill passed by Congress in August, the international climate challenge remains dire as diplomats gather in Egypt next week at the annual United Nations climate negotiations.
The key question for the U.S., EU and their allies, who are now spending hundreds of billions to cut their own domestic climate emissions, is how to compel China and other major emitting countries to reduce their greenhouse gases. Because today China’s emissions alone are nearly one-third of the global annual total, more than all the developed countries combined, and still rising. Simply put, global greenhouse emissions cannot decline — and climate protection cannot be achieved — until and unless China begins to cut its emissions.
Yet China’s President Xi Jinping, fresh from gaining a third consecutive five-year term at the Communist Party Congress, is moving in the opposite direction. Recent Chinese actions, including the suspension of climate change coordination with the United States, confirms that a kind of climate-and-energy Cold War has broken out, with China and Russia at its center. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine split an already fragile climate coalition of major-emitting nations, with China, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and, to some extent, India, playing nice with Vladimir Putin in part to get cheaper oil and gas, while each of these nations is suddenly less squeamish about emissions.
But as recent floods in Pakistan, Nigeria and elsewhere illustrate, climate change-related weather disasters are becoming a huge new source of instability and economic strife in developed and developing countries around the world. China is now their main cause.
The U.S. must deploy global public opinion against China’s emissions growth, as well as Beijing’s cynical support of Putin. Nations around the world understand all too well that China’s current promise to peak emissions by 2030 is inadequate to the climate challenge, and indeed is less than business as usual. Yet Beijing continues to build coal-fired power plants rapidly, and now burns more coal each year than the rest of the world combined.
Such emissions growth cannot continue if the climate is to be stabilized. China must commit to absolute reductions in its emissions by 2025. This should be an explicit policy demand by U.S., EU and indeed all nations at the UN climate negotiations. Reductions in fast-growing emissions from other developing nations, including India, must then also follow within the next decade.
Aggressive trade policy, including carbon border tariffs, could help compel China and other major emitters to limit emissions. The EU is currently set to implement the world’s first Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism, which will be introduced in 2023 and become operational in 2026. Enacting carbon tariffs on imports from nations like China, whose goods are more carbon-intensive than those made in the EU and U.S., could also prove politically popular in America. In 2020, candidate Joe Biden included this possibility in his campaign climate platform, and more recently allies like Sen. Chris Coons of Delaware have proposed carbon tariff legislation, which has importantly also gained interest from Republicans like North Dakota Sen. Kevin Cramer.
Action on methane, a climate pollutant 80 times more powerful in forcing warming than carbon dioxide, is another area of opportunity, especially since its mitigation tends to be inexpensive. The EU, U.S. and 100 other nations have signed the Global Methane Pledge to cut total methane emissions by 30% by 2030, but China, Russia and India, the three largest methane emitters, have not.
China itself is suffering greatly from climate change impacts, including the worst drought in 60 years, and the government has taken to seeding clouds to bring rain. These impacts are themselves slowing China’s economy, as hydropower along key rivers including tributaries of the Yangtze has been greatly diminished, increasing the need for coal power, and so China has every reason to act.
China’s year-on-year emissions did unexpectedly drop during the spring, due to COVID control measures, and falls in steel and cement manufacturing, along with more renewable power production. But this merely demonstrates that China can cut long-term emissions deeply if it only tries. Meanwhile, the U.S., EU and the private sector must make clean energy deployment and climate change adaptation and resilience in poorer developing countries a key focus of investment to both cut emissions and establish good will.
Putin’s illegal invasion has caused deep misery in Ukraine, while roiling the global economy, and spiking inflation in energy markets. But it must not be allowed to delay or undermine action on the climate crisis. Thus far, China has used Russia’s invasion and China’s own threats against Taiwan as a smokescreen to obscure its climate irresponsibility. This cannot stand. It’s time for the U.S. and all other nations to call on China to stop its new Climate Change Cold War.
Bledsoe is a professorial lecturer at American University’s Center for Environmental Policy, and strategic adviser at the Progressive Policy Institute in Washington.
