“We ultimately can’t solve climate change without China. It’s by far the largest emitter in the world,” Joanna Lewis, a China specialist at Georgetown University, told The Washington Post.
And at times, China and the U.S. have risen above the challenges posed by their economic and geopolitical rivalry. At a UN climate conference in Glasgow in 2021, a joint U.S.-Chinese pledge to cooperate on climate issues helped push other negotiators toward a more ambitious final agreement, diplomats said at the time.
But there have been many ups and downs. As The New York Times’ Peter Baker wrote recently, “at an international climate change conference early in his administration, President Barack Obama confronted a senior Chinese official who offered what the American delegation considered a weak commitment. Mr. Obama dismissed the offer. Not good enough.”
The Chinese official “erupted,” Baker wrote, relying on an oral history produced by Columbia University. “What do you mean that’s not good enough? Why isn’t that good enough?” The official mentioned a past conversation he had had with John Kerry, then a Democratic senator. “I talked to Senator Kerry, and Senator Kerry said that was good enough.” Baker wrote that Obama “looked at him evenly and said, ‘Well, Senator Kerry is not president of the United States.’”
Can the two nations find a way to cooperate on climate? “Today we’re faced with a really complex geopolitical environment. And I don’t think that the U.S. government has a clear understanding of how climate fits within its overall strategy toward China,” said Kelly Sims Gallagher, a professor at the Fletcher School at Tufts University who was a senior adviser on Chinese climate issues under Obama.
She suggested that the Chinese may be using climate as a bargaining chip to achieve other gains in its overall relationship with Washington. “Climate is understood by China to be something the U.S. wants, and it's using climate as a source of leverage in the multifaceted relationship,” she told The Washington Post.
Kerry, who now serves as special presidential envoy for climate, said recently that he had been invited to China in the “near term” to keep talking about climate issues.
China’s climate performance is a mix of good and bad. Regrettably, provincial governments approved more coal-fired power plants in the first three months of 2023 than they did in all of 2021, according to Greenpeace East Asia.
But China also installed a record amount of solar power capacity last year — and this year alone is set to install more than the entire existing solar capacity of the United States.
To nudge China to reduce emissions and act more ambitiously on climate, the Biden administration has started to explore other tools, including tariffs that would be linked to the carbon footprint of Chinese imports, reported The Post’s Michael Birnbaum and Christian Shepherd.
Such tariffs could be an effective long-term incentive for Chinese manufacturers to invest in cleaner technology and research to lower emissions in steel, aluminum and other exports, said Philippe Benoit, a scholar at the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University.
That idea has raised hackles in China, which contends that tariffs would be less about battling climate change than about blunting Chinese trade. A tariff would “primarily be intended to protect domestic industrial competitiveness,” said Sun Yongping, director of the Global Climate Governance Research Center at Huazhong University of Science and Technology. If implemented, it would “cast a shadow” over U.S.-China climate cooperation and damage mutual trust by creating challenges for Chinese exports, he said.
One way or another, the two giants must find a way to work together. “It would be a huge missed opportunity for the U.S. to not be engaging in one of the few areas where we can have constructive conversations with China,” said Georgetown’s Lewis.