Trump Victory Leaves China Calling the Shots at COP29 Climate Negotiations
Campaign has vowed to pull U.S. out of Paris accord, but China appears more committed than ever
With Donald Trump’s election victory, the U.S. is headed again for the exits of the Paris accord, the international climate agreement signed nearly a decade ago, and toward an energy policy inspired by Trump’s campaign mantra “drill, baby, drill.”
China, on the other hand, appears more committed to the agreement than ever. It has vaulted to global leadership in renewable-energy deployment and is spending billions on green-energy projects across the developing world. Poorer nations increasingly look to Beijing for help shifting away from fossil fuels.
The sharp divergence between the two leading superpowers is expected to loom over the annual United Nations climate conference, known as COP29, kicking off in Baku, Azerbaijan, on Monday. Chinese leaders have thrown the country’s titanic economic power behind the shift to clean energy for economic, environmental and geostrategic reasons.
“China stands ready to work with other parties to uphold the goal, principles and system of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Paris Agreement,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning said on Friday.
Trump’s victory has underscored what many countries already believed: that America’s internal political divisions mean it can’t reliably lead global climate diplomacy. If Trump follows through on withdrawal, it would be the third time this century that a Republican president has pulled the U.S. out of a major international climate agreement.
“Everyone looks to China now,” said Jonathan Pershing, a senior U.S. climate negotiator under the Obama and Biden administrations. “I think with the U.S. out, China will step up, but in a very different way.”
Trump’s victory has left U.S. negotiators in Baku with a short-lived mandate. They are led by John Podesta, the climate envoy of the lame duck Biden administration, who will have no influence on policy once Trump takes office on Jan. 20. Chinese President Xi Jinping is sending Ding Xuexiang, a vice premier and one of his close confidants, to a leaders’ summit that begins on Tuesday.
At past U.N. climate summits, talks between Washington and Beijing have led to negotiating breakthroughs. In 2015, they helped forge the Paris accord itself, which calls for governments to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius over preindustrial temperatures and requires rich nations to send more than $100 billion a year to the developing world for climate-change projects.
The willingness of the world’s two largest greenhouse-gas emitters to agree to limit their emissions served as a powerful incentive for the rest of the world to come along. U.S. negotiating teams also spent countless hours pushing the Chinese leadership to move away from coal-fired electricity more quickly. That pressure appeared to have some effect on China’s climate stance, said Li Shuo, an expert in Chinese climate policy at the Asia Society Policy Institute, a think tank.
“The ripple effect of the Trump presidency leaving will be a negative factor not only for China’s climate action, but climate action globally,” Li said, adding that Trump’s decision to pull the U.S. out of the Paris agreement in 2017 dampened climate ambition around the world after a few years.
But much has changed since then. China deployed renewable energy far faster than almost anyone expected seven years ago. The pace of China’s wind- and solar-capacity additions is now roughly large enough to cover its growth in energy demand, meaning that its emissions may have already peaked. More important, green technology sectors have become core to China’s economy; Chinese officials refer to solar panels, electric vehicles and batteries as the “new trio” of the country’s industrial base.
All that means China’s stake in pushing the clean-energy transition is far greater than in 2017. Beijing is using climate diplomacy to project its economic influence abroad in the developing world, finding new markets for its world-leading renewable-energy manufacturers. That is key for Beijing at a time when Chinese producers of solar panels, electric vehicles, batteries and other equipment are reeling from massive overcapacity and facing steep new tariffs from the U.S., Europe and other big economies. Though the size of China’s overseas investments has fallen sharply since 2016, the number of green-energy investments has defied that trend.
“This is an export market in which the U.S. should be competing,” Pershing said, “and one of the potential consequences of withdrawal is we lose that competition.”
At the meeting in Baku, negotiators’ main job is to strike a deal on a new goal for wealthy countries to provide climate finance for the developing world after 2025—a task set by the Paris climate agreement. A key demand from wealthy countries is for China, which has always been considered as developing under U.N. climate agreements, to accept some responsibility for providing climate funds under the Paris agreement.
“Developed countries should earnestly fulfill their responsibilities and provide strong financial support to developing countries for their climate response,” Mao said. “China will continue to offer assistance to fellow developing countries to the best of its capacity.”
Even had Trump not won, the U.S. negotiating team would have little credibility on this issue. The U.S. has failed to live up to past promises to deliver climate finance because of opposition from Republicans in Congress. A pledging conference for a new fund to compensate developing countries for severe climate-change effects—called loss and damage—only yielded $17.5 million from the U.S. compared with some $430 million from European nations.
China has yet to make a contribution to the fund but it agreed to a provision that would allow developing nations to contribute. Analysts are watching whether Beijing agrees to start providing climate finance through the U.N.
“At the moment their line has been not very vocal, not very pushy,” said one international climate-finance official participating in the Baku talks. “The reality is that China is now doing more on climate than anyone else by a very long way.”
Write to Matthew Dalton at Matthew.Dalton@wsj.com
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Appeared in the November 12, 2024, print edition as 'Trump Win Puts Beijing at Front Of Climate Talks'.