Call out Beijing’s environmental abuses instead.
Call out Beijing’s environmental abuses instead.
T he White House believes that it can deter Beijing from invading Taiwan, punish the Chinese Communist Party for its genocidal campaign against the Uyghurs and the Hong Kong crackdown, and react to other misbehavior, all while simultaneously seeking bilateral cooperation on climate change. And it believes, as top Biden administration officials fanned out to achieve this latter diplomatic feat, that it can do so without ceding ground on the other issues.
The problem is simple, as Miles Yu, a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution described it to me in an interview last week. “The world is begging China to cooperate,” he said. “China uses this kind of plea not as an opportunity to solve the problem, but as an opportunity to bargain with, to blackmail the international community.” In other words, unlike the American officials calling the state of the climate a crisis, Beijing will play along, but only to leverage its most valuable bargaining chip: the planet.
Accordingly, top officials apparently see only what they want to see. After a trip to Shanghai this past weekend, U.S. climate envoy John Kerry suggested that there’s been some progress. “This is the first time China has joined in saying it’s a crisis,” he said, noting that the Chinese officials discussed “enhancing” their commitments to cut carbon emissions. To his credit, the meeting did yield some low-hanging fruit, such as the two sides’ agreement to ratify an agreement banning an ozone-depleting gas, and their suggestion of future cooperation on financing developing countries’ transitions to clean energy. Ahead of the meeting, even Yu, who previously advised Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on China, had said that he’d give the Biden team one or two chances at such meetings before writing them off.
But there’s little reason for optimism about the administration’s “cooperative” approach, which has ramped up ahead of a virtual Earth Day summit that Biden is hosting later this week and in anticipation of an annual U.N. climate conference slated for November. Increasingly, China’s domestic energy production makes it ever less likely that it can meet the goals that it set out under the Paris Agreement and elsewhere. When the country’s leaders make sweeping pledges, as Xi did at the U.N. in September when he promised that China would reach carbon neutrality by 2060, they generate more fawning headlines than the follow-on action to achieve them would warrant. By every indication, China’s not just failing to cut its emissions; it is increasing its ability to continue to grow them, and it does so as certain Western observers play up Beijing’s false promises over a tangible trend that sees declining U.S. carbon emissions.
Data from 2020 illustrate this underappreciated discrepancy. Three-fourths of all new coal plants commissioned last year were commissioned in China, even as the number of coal plants in the rest of the world declined, according to a report by the Global Energy Monitor. As the situation stands, China will only continue to distance itself from achieving the benchmarks called for under the Paris Agreement. These are plants that will go online, meaning that they will account for future emissions growth. “They’re likely going to increase the amount of coal-power capacity that they have through 2025, maybe even 2030, and the IPCC, in their reports to keep global warming well below two degrees, called for between a 50 and 75 percent decrease in coal power generation by 2030,” said Christine Shearer, one of the report’s co-authors, in an interview. Currently, China accounts for half of coal-power capacity under development globally. But counted with projects to which Chinese entities offer financial assistance or engineering support, the country accounts for two-thirds to three-fourths of coal power being developed around the world, Shearer noted.
To be sure, China has its own, genuine reasons to seek emissions reductions. It has an interest, for instance, in leading when it comes to renewables, energy storage, and other technologies, and “China’s food security and water resources are also highly vulnerable to climate change,” Lauri Myllyvirta, lead analyst at the Center for Research on Energy and Clean Air and another co-author of the Global Energy Monitor report, wrote in an email to NR. “There are short-term trade-offs and conflicts of interest to contend with, but the aim of decarbonizing the environment is serious.” It’s for this reason that Secretary of State Antony Blinken, in a landmark address on the administration’s climate diplomacy on Monday, called for competition with Beijing across these industries: “If we don’t catch up, America will miss the chance to shape the world’s climate future in a way that reflects our interests and values.”
Although that is more clear-eyed than the so-called cooperative approach that he and his colleagues have pushed, Blinken clearly views this aspect of U.S.–China competition as complementary to Kerry’s negotiations, which he explicitly endorsed in his speech. Blinken pledged on Monday, as Kerry has repeatedly in recent weeks, that this does not mean “treating other countries’ progress on climate as a chip they can use to excuse bad behavior in other areas.” But the Chinese foreign ministry has been clear that significant concessions won’t come without concessions on U.S. meddling in its “internal affairs” (read: human-rights abuses and Taiwan). Besides, what’s more likely is that any Chinese efforts on climate will plod along at a pace dictated domestically.
Meanwhile, the Biden administration seems to be forfeiting an important point of leverage with which it can press the Chinese regime to improve its behavior. Even the Trump administration, which was maligned by climate advocates after leaving Paris, continued to commit to emissions reductions at international fora, and Trump himself highlighted this trend during his own 2020 speech before the U.N. General Assembly in which he attacked China’s delinquent environmental practices. What Trump argued then still stands today: “Those who attack America’s exceptional environmental record while ignoring China’s rampant pollution are not interested in the environment.”
The Biden administration has pulled its punches, opting for a softer approach that may yield negotiated results. But it should instead build on the previous administration’s efforts, as it has in aspects of U.S. policy toward China. Following Trump’s U.N. speech last year, the State Department unveiled a webpage describing the litany of ways in which the CCP has desecrated the environment, far exceeding a focus solely on carbon emissions. The site, which was archived at the end of the Trump administration and has not since been revived by Blinken’s team, runs through everything from China’s carbon emissions, to its mercury and plastic pollution, to its leading role in the illegal-wildlife trade, as well as fishing practices that violate countries’ exclusive economic zones and deplete them of fish stocks. Making a point of criticizing these practices could serve a role similar to the administration’s commendable work in other areas: calling out bad behavior and rallying U.S. allies to respond. After all, the CCP’s environmental degradation is a global threat.
The CCP understands that a well-executed smear campaign centered on climate can help meet its political objectives, and the Chinese foreign ministry last week labeled the U.S. as a “truant student returning to school.” Failing to set the record straight would be unilateral disarmament amid Beijing’s broader assault on international order.
To the administration’s credit, Blinken did offer an oblique warning during his speech on Monday: “When countries continue to rely on coal for a significant amount of their energy or invest in new coal factories, or allow for massive deforestation, they will hear from the United States and our partners about how harmful these actions are.” Predictably, though, and disappointingly, he declined to name names.