RATLAND China resists mounting pressure to do more on climate change
The United States, other Western countries and some low-lying island nations have been pressing China to take on more responsibility in advancing global climate goals ahead of the conference, according to some veteran climate negotiators and leading Chinese experts. They say they want Beijing to spell out soon how it will slash its planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions over the next decade. They also say they want China to contribute more cash to help poor countries address the catastrophic impacts of climate change, including rising seas and stronger storms.
But China, despite being the world’s leading producer and installer of renewable energy, remains resistant to outside pressure on climate action, according to the negotiators and experts.
Recent assessments from top climate scientists have found that only drastic action can keep alive the Paris agreement’s goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) — a threshold Earth may have already crossed. Only a rapid transition away from fossil fuels by mid-century could sustain the crucial goal, according to the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
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The United States and China — the world’s two biggest emitters of greenhouse gases — typically play an outsize role at the U.N. Climate Change Conference. At this year’s talks — scheduled to start Nov. 11 in Baku, Azerbaijan — experts said joint commitments from the two superpowers could cajole other countries to set their own stronger climate targets.
But a September visit to China by John D. Podesta, senior adviser to President Joe Biden for international climate policy, did not yield the kind of joint action between Washington and Beijing that has catalyzed broader breakthroughs in previous talks.
“This relationship is at a breaking point. If both sides can’t unite this time, they will diverge more in the future,” said Li Shuo, director of the China Climate Hub at the Asia Society Policy Institute, a think tank.
Chinese leader Xi Jinping has said publicly that Beijing alone will determine how it addresses global warming and how quickly it transitions away from fossil fuels. In comments to top Communist Party officials last year, Xi declared that such efforts “should and must be” determined without outside interference.
The Chinese Foreign Ministry and Ministry for Ecology and Environment didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Chinese negotiators have not been totally uncooperative ahead of the pivotal talks in Baku, offering some small concessions to Podesta and his team.
Podesta acknowledged in an interview that his meetings in Beijing did not produce a significant breakthrough. But he insisted that they yielded meaningful progress, including a commitment from China to continue focusing on cutting all greenhouse gases, not just carbon dioxide, over the next decade.
“Obviously the overall U.S.-China relationship has a lot of tension and a lot of friction,” Podesta said. “Climate change ... has been a place where both President Biden and President Xi have tried to find a lane of cooperation.”
Tensions over new targets
One of the top priorities at the summit is for countries to set new targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 2035. But China is unlikely to announce a new 2035 target before or during the talks in Baku, according to Chinese experts, although Chinese officials have said they will comply with a February U.N. deadline.
In 2020, Xi pledged that China would reach peak emissions “before 2030” and achieve net-zero emissions by 2060. But Beijing has not updated this official target since then, even as its massive renewable-energy installations have led some experts to predict that it may be close to peak emissions already.
Activists and experts argue that Beijing should commit to cut total emissions by a specific amount over the next five or 10 years. An analysis from the Asia Society Policy Institute suggested that a target of reducing emissions by 30 percent by 2035 is needed for China to hit its own climate goals.
For context, the Biden administration in 2021 announced plans to cut emissions 50 to 52 percent below 2005 levels by 2030. The European Union is targeting a reduction of at least 55 percent by 2030.
Yet Beijing has a record of setting weak targets and then surpassing them years ahead of schedule, effectively giving other countries cover to do the same, according to some U.S. officials.
“China likes to undercommit and overperform,” said a senior State Department official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to comment publicly. “... And if the largest emitter plays it safe, it kind of gives license to everybody else to play it safe.”
Yang Lei, vice president of the Institute of Energy at Peking University, said China is taking a sensible path.
“Some countries prefer to give a very clear signal ... of what they are working towards, but sometimes they talk a lot but do nothing,” he said. “China is more conservative. If we promise something, it should be achievable.”
That preference complicates American efforts to use ambitious bilateral agreements with China to inject momentum into talks.
Podesta’s low-key trip to Beijing was only the second time he sat down with his Chinese counterpart, Liu Zhenmin, since the two took on the roles earlier this year. Their predecessors, John F. Kerry and Xie Zhenhua, had built a strong working relationship over more than two decades of often intense and lengthy talks.
Unlike Xie, a technocrat who studied engineering and environmental law before rising to vice chair at China’s powerful economic planner, Liu is a career diplomat, suggesting Beijing increasingly views climate negotiations as the purview of the less-influential Foreign Ministry.
Kerry said he sought to discuss climate change with China separately from other contentious issues, including tensions over trade after Biden slapped steep tariffs on cheap imports of Chinese electric vehicles, solar cells and other green technologies.
“You can’t take 15 things with a major player like China, the second-largest economy in the world, and think that you’re just going to walk into the room and say, ‘Oh, do this and do that,’” Kerry said during a Washington Post Live event in September. “Those days are over. It’s done. That’s not how the world works now.”
Cash crunch
Another likely sticking point in Baku: whether China should contribute more cash to poor countries that are most vulnerable to the ravages of climate change, including stronger storms and rising seas.
In 2009, wealthy nations set a goal of providing $100 billion a year by 2020 to help poor countries cope with climate damage, but they didn’t reach that goal until 2022, two years late. A priority in Baku will be setting a new target on climate finance — but countries are still squabbling over how much it should be and who should pay.
Wopke Hoekstra, the European commissioner for climate action, said there is “increasing frustration” in the European Union that the U.N. still classifies China as a developing country, allowing it to avoid paying its fair share.
“When you get out of the car [in Beijing], you already sense you’re not in a developing country,” Hoekstra said. “And to put it more succinctly, if you are able to embark on a mission to the moon, I’m pretty sure you also have the ability to take more responsibility in the domain of climate action beyond your own borders.”
Pa’olelei Luteru, chair of the Alliance of Small Island States, a group of 39 islands and low-lying coastal nations that negotiate as a bloc at international climate talks, echoed that sentiment.
“China is defined and recognized as a developing country, but we do understand their contribution to global emissions, and this is where they also need to make a contribution” to international climate finance, Luteru said.
Chinese officials have countered with claims that the United States is responsible for a larger share of historical greenhouse gas emissions. They highlight pockets of relative poverty across the country, meaning some rich countries, including the United States, release more tons of carbon dioxide per person.
Officials have also underscored the financial burdens of decarbonizing an economy dominated by manufacturing and heavy industry. “China itself still faces a huge funding shortfall for addressing climate change,” Liu told a conference in June to explain China’s reluctance to contribute as much as developed nations.
From 2013 to 2022, China did provide $45 billion in climate aid for poor countries through other mechanisms such as a South-South Climate Cooperation Fund, according to research by the World Resources Institute, an environmental think tank. But these other mechanisms lack the transparency and accountability of the U.N. process, said Shuang Liu, China finance director at WRI and lead author of the analysis.
Given Beijing’s concern about political pressure, analysts have suggested negotiators appeal to China’s economic self-interest to encourage climate action. Beijing may be more receptive when raised ambition is framed as a business opportunity for Chinese manufacturers of solar panels, batteries and other fossil fuel-replacing technologies.
“It’s becoming obvious that China’s low-carbon energy transition is very much aligned with its own economic interests,” said Yao Zhe, a Beijing-based global policy adviser at Greenpeace East Asia. “But the argument that might be most effective is not the argument European or American counterparts want to use because they are a bit afraid of China’s dominance in clean energy manufacturing.”
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