Trump offers China a golden climate opportunity

In what will likely be the hottest year on record, in a month in which all but two US states are in the grip of drought, and on the day a new hurricane formed in the Caribbean, Donald Trump, climate denier and thirsty for oil drilling, won the American presidency for the second time. And today, delegates from around the world will begin this year's UN global climate negotiations in Baku, Azerbaijan. This UN Conference of the Parties (COP) aims to decide how much money rich, high-emissions countries should spend on poorer countries that did not cause the warming in the first place, but on Americans, representing the country that currently has the second highest level of emissions. and it is by far the largest historical emitter and cannot today make any promises that anyone should believe it would keep.

We know perfectly well [Trump] I won't give another penny to climate finance, and that will neutralize whatever is agreed, Joanna Depledge, a fellow at the University of Cambridge and an expert on international climate negotiations, told me. Without aid of around $1 trillion per year, developing countries' green transitions will not happen fast enough to prevent catastrophic global warming. But wealthy donor countries are more likely to contribute if others do, and if the United States does not contribute, other large emitters have the opportunity to weaken their own climate finance commitments.

Ironically, for a president-elect who loves to vilify China, Trump could present that nation with a golden opportunity. Historically, China has worked to block ambitious climate deals, but whoever manages to resolve the issue of global climate finance will be hailed as a hero. As the United States abandons its leadership role on climate, China luckyand some good reasons to step in and take it on.

In Baku, the spotlight will now be on China as the world's top emitter, whether the country likes it or not, Li Shuo, director of the Asia Society Policy Institute, said in a press call. The Biden administration has successfully pushed China to be more ambitious in some of its climate goals, leading for example to a commitment to reduce methane emissions. But the Trump administration will likely sideline ongoing U.S.-China climate talks and withdraw, for the second time, the United States from the Paris Agreement, which requires participants to commit to specific emissions reduction targets. Last time around, Trump's withdrawal made China look good by comparison, without the country necessarily needing to change course or address its obvious problems, like its expanding coal industry. The same thing will likely happen again, Alex Wang, a UCLA law professor and expert on U.S.-China relations, told me.

China is, after all, the leading producer and installer of green energy, but green energy alone is not enough to avoid perilous levels of warming. China likes to point out that it is classified as a developing country at these gatherings and that it has fought deals that would require it to limit its emissions or fork out money and, by extension, limit its growth . But while the United States is willing to do nothing constructive, China's position on climate looks rosy in comparison.

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By removing its contributions to international climate finance, the United States will also give China more room to expand its influence across green soft power. China has spent the last five years or so focusing on building green infrastructure in Africa, Latin America and Southeast Asia, Wang said. Tong Zhao, senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said Reuters that China hopes to expand its influence in emerging power vacuums under a second Trump term. Under Biden, the United States was trying to compete in green energy by setting up programs to help transition to clean energy in Indonesia or Vietnam, Wang noted. But I now suspect that these federal efforts will be eliminated.

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Most experts now view the global shift toward solar and other clean energy as self-propelling and inevitable. When Trump first took office, solar panels and electric vehicles weren't hot topics. Eight years later, it is absolutely clear that China dominates in these areas, Wang said. China took advantage of the first Trump administration to become by far the world's largest clean technology supplier. The Biden administration has tried to catch up on climate technology, primarily through the Inflation Reduction Act, but even today, Shuo told me, Chinese leaders are not considering the United States as a competitor in the field of clean technologies. They haven't seen the first US-made electric vehicle or solar panel installed in Indonesia, have they? he said. And of course, America's backwardness could be exacerbated by the Trump administration, which has promised to repeal the IRA, leaving potentially $80 billion of potential clean technology companies that other countries, but especially China, could exploit. Across all international climate arenas, the United States is poised to hurt itself.

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More practically, Baku could give China a chance to negotiate favorable trade deals with the EU, which has just started imposing new carbon-based tariffs. But none of this guarantees that China will decide to play a decisive role in brokering a strong climate finance deal. Climate finance is what could prevent the world from sliding into darker, completely avoidable climate scenarios. But the news of Trump's election risks giving the COP an air of collective hangover. EU countries will certainly take a strong leadership position in the negotiations, but they do not have the fiscal or political muscle to fill the void that the United States will leave behind. Without surprise commitments from China and other historically begrudgingly cooperative countries, the COP could simply fail to reach a financial agreement or, more likely, prove miserably weak.

The global climate community has been here before, however. The United States has a history of obstructing climate negotiations. In 1992, the Rio Treaty was made entirely voluntary at the insistence of President George HW Bush. In 1997, the Clinton-Gore administration had no strategy for ratifying the Kyoto Protocol in the Senate; the United States has still never ratified it.

But even though President George W. Bush's administration has declared that Kyoto deadit's actually laid the foundations for the Paris Agreement. The Paris Agreement survived Trump's first term and will survive another, Tina Stege, the climate envoy to the Marshall Islands, told me. The last time Trump was elected, the EU, China and Canada issued a common trading platform continue climate discussions without the United States. This largely achieved nothingbut the coalition will now have a second chance. And by placing too much emphasis on U.S. policy, Stege said she ignores the fact that countries like hers are pushing for diplomatic deals that will determine the survival of their territories.

Nor is the United States defined solely by its federal government. At the subnational level, a number of organizations emerged in the United States during the first Trump administration to mobilize governors, mayors, and CEOs to intervene in climate diplomacy. These include the American Climate Alliance (a bipartisan coalition of 24 governors) And America is at full tilt: a coalition of 5,000 mayors, college presidents, health care officials and faith leaders, co-chaired by Washington State Governor Jay Inslee and former EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy, among other climate heavyweights. This time, they won't start from scratch to convince the rest of the world that at least parts of the United States are still committed to fighting climate change.