Only China can now be a global climate leader

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The author is an editor at FT and writes the Chartbook newsletter

Do you remember January 2021? Joe Biden took office and loudly proclaimed: “America is back!” As Secretary of State, Antony Blinken liked to remark: “Like it or not, the world does not organize itself.” The USA’s claim to leadership extended to all areas: on trade and defense, technology and climate. Given its enormous per capita emissions, the idea that the U.S. could truly be a leader in decarbonization beggared belief. But the new mood in Washington was welcome.

Now, less than four years later, Republicans are in charge. There will be continuities in defense and trade policy from Biden to Donald Trump. But when it comes to climate, the USA is once again halfway there.

When it comes to global environmental concerns, the United States has an irretrievably divided personality. Far from organizing the world, it will be the world that must adapt to the disorganizing effects of America’s polarized and depressingly unintelligent democracy.

In the 1980s and 1990s, American scientists, like everyone else, defined climate as the challenge of our time. But even as the Clinton administration was preparing the first global climate agreement, the Senate passed the Byrd-Hagel resolution, denouncing the UN treaty that exempted developing countries from costly climate protection measures. The flagship Kyoto Treaty was not even submitted to the Senate.

In 2015, marked by this experience, the Paris climate accords were designed specifically to implement Byrd-Hagel. The agreement does not require Senate ratification and is based on nationally determined contributions. Still, Trump announced in 2017 that the U.S. would withdraw from the pact after running a campaign denouncing the climate crisis as a Chinese hoax.

In 2018, after their successful comeback in the midterm elections, the Democratic left rallied behind the Green New Deal. But Trump’s popularity has hardly suffered – without Covid he would certainly have been re-elected in 2020. After months of struggle, Biden finally managed to pass a historic package of green energy subsidies. However, this was disguised as an Inflation Reduction Act, peppered with national protection measures specifically aimed at China.

America can claim to have co-invented modern renewable energy. Scientists abandoned NASA on the idea of ​​modern solar energy in the 1970s. At the state level, California has a share of renewable energy comparable to that of Europe. With support from the Obama administration, Tesla made electric vehicles cool.

But liking new sources of strength is one thing. Taking the energy transition seriously is something completely different. The strict carbon pricing used in Europe fell out of fashion in Washington DC with the failure of Obama’s emissions trading proposal in 2010. America’s preferred energy policy is more, more, more and as cheap as possible. After years of heavy investment in fracking, the US under Biden became the largest oil producer the world has ever seen. Trump plans to increase production by another 3 million barrels. The decarbonization of the electricity supply will continue to advance as wind and solar energy are now significantly cheaper. But even though hurricanes regularly devastate parts of the country, any larger ambitions to meet America’s climate goals are off the table.

The inescapable conclusion of the last 35 years is that it is foolish to view the United States as a reliable partner in global climate policy.

During Biden’s honeymoon, there was hope that the US and Europe would act together. In Europe, complete climate skepticism is rare and the EU has built an impressive array of subsidies and carbon prices. The end of coal-fired power generation in Britain this year was historic. But in Europe too, the cost of living crisis is changing the political mood against strict climate protection measures. The looming crisis in Europe’s automotive industry, sparked by China’s success in electric vehicles, exposes the hypocrisy of a continent that promised a green deal but stuck with diesel.

Both Europe and the US have, to varying degrees, failed to grasp the challenge of decarbonization recognized by their own scientists decades ago. As the global climate leader, it can now only be China, which is responsible for more than 30 percent of global emissions and dominates the green energy supply chain. Given the increasing tensions with the USA, Beijing has every reason to minimize oil imports. The key question is whether the Chinese Communist Party can muster the political will to override its fossil fuel interests. If it succeeds, it will not solve the climate crisis single-handedly, but it will assert a leadership claim that the West will find difficult to respond to.

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