Just like almost everything else about China, the country’s policies towards climate change are a source of massive controversy, dispute and obfuscation. Depending who you listen to, China is either going to save the world through its enlightened green policies, or it’s going to doom it through its massive carbon emissions.
The reality is that China is currently a greater contributor to global warming than any other country, producing around a third of total greenhouse gas emissions, even though it only accounts for a sixth of the the world’s population. According to the latest World Bank data, China’s carbon emissions per capita have overtaken those of the EU, the UK and various other places whose people are nominally wealthier than the Chinese (although the US, Canada and Australia still have per capita emissions around double China’s figure).
While China has become a huge polluter, it would be inaccurate to say that nothing is being done about it. In the last few years, China has seen a massive wave of investment in '“green” sectors, like solar power and electric cars. Its electric vehicle market is surging, with 30% of all cars sold in China now electrified, a percentage that’s only beaten by a few northern European countries.
The expansion of renewable energy over the last two years has been so huge it boggles the mind. New Chinese installations of solar power in 2023 alone are equivalent to twice the total installed capacity in the US. While solar power is expanding particularly fast, new wind power capacity is also being created at a pace unthinkable in most of the world. As of the end of 2023, just over 50% of China’s total installed power capacity came from renewable sources.
Unfortunately, the actual use of renewable energy is not rising as fast as the rate of new installations suggest, since most of China’s dams, wind farms and solar power plants are located in the country’s west, while most of the people, industry and demand for electricity are in the east. An outdated power grid makes it hard to transport renewable energy to the areas of highest demand. Even so, the rate of utilisation of renewables is also rising fast, with around 30% of China’s total power consumption coming from renewable energy last year, up from around 15% in 2020.
Part of this surge in green investment is due to these sectors naturally becoming more profitable than fossil fuels, and to the clampdown on the real estate sector diverting funds to other, less carbon-intensive, industries. But there has also been a clear political will to make China central to global supply chains for low-carbon technologies.
China’s huge carbon emissions are currently still growing, with a 4% increase foreseen for 2023 (which is partly due to the economic recovery from the draconian Covid controls of 2022). But serious analysts now predict that China’s emissions may well reach their peak in 2024, or in any case within the next few years, and then begin their historic decline.
The US and EU’s carbon emissions peaked in 2007-08, and then started to decline. Although it may have been the global financial crisis of 2008 that caused this in the immediate, by now it is clear that the decline is structural. If China can peak its emissions less than 20 years after the West did, this can be considered a good result, given the different starting points.
Given the urgency of the situation, it would obviously be nice if China could bring its emissions down to zero tomorrow. There is no way this is going to happen, any more than it’ll happen in America or Europe. It would be hugely disruptive to suddenly shut down all of China’s coal plants, which still provide the country with a large portion of its energy.
Nonetheless, continuing to push China to decarbonise faster makes sense. Xi Jinping’s official goal of peaking China’s carbon emissions by 2030 will definitely be met, but if emissions keep rising steadily until that point, this will be too little, too late, to prevent catastrophic climate change.
In sum, it’s fair to say that the Chinese government is taking real action on climate change and carbon emissions at home. This makes you wonder why the country is such a bad player when it comes to climate diplomacy.
At last month’s COP28 in Dubai, it was hard to shake the feeling that China played a negative, obstructive role in the negotiations. The Chinese delegation was skeptical of including a call to "phase out" fossil fuels in the final declaration, and in the end it was not included. It also objected to a call for global emissions to peak by 2025, and the call was dropped. China further declined to sign up to a global pledge to triple renewables by 2030, although in fairness this might be because its recent expansion of renewable energy is so massive that it would be almost impossible to triple.
China’s track record at previous summits on climate change isn’t exactly unassailable, either. The country has a long record of teaming up with other large industrialising nations, particularly India, and demanding that the West take on most of the burden of addressing climate change, while pushing back against efforts to demand more of China, India and fellow “developing countries”.
The framing that guides Chinese representatives is that China is a developing country, and that the historical fault for climate change lies with the “developed countries”, i.e. the West and Japan, so it is they who have the most obligation to do something about it.
This attitude took shape during the 90s, when efforts to stop climate change got underway in earnest. This was the time when the Kyoto Protocol, the first international treaty to set binding targets for countries to cut their emissions, came into effect. The Protocol rigidly divided the world into “developed” and “developing” countries, and only set binding targets for the first. At the time this seemed sensible: developing countries still had a lot of catching-up to do, and it felt unreasonable to demand too much of them.
The categorization of “developed” and “developing” used in the Kyoto Protocol was set in 1992, when the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change was established in Rio de Janeiro. China was placed among the developing countries, which was quite logical given how poor the country was back then.
Sensible as it may have been at the time to exempt developing countries, and to place China among them, this was too much for the US, which never ratified the Kyoto Protocol. When repudiating Kyoto, in February 2001, President George W. Bush wrote: ‘I oppose the Kyoto Protocol because it exempts 80 percent of the world, including major population centers such as China and India, from compliance, and would cause serious harm to the US economy.’
In today’s climate change negotiations, countries are still considered to be either developed or developing according to the categories set in 1992. This is becoming problematic all round, but particularly so in the case of China, which is now a middle-to-high income country and the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases.
And yet, over the years, attempts to change this status quo have met with strong pushback. In the Copenhagen Summit of 2009, China and India successfully prevented the passage of a deal, favoured by the EU, that would have aimed for a 50% reduction in global carbon emissions compared to 1990, but would have included binding commitments from developing countries including India and China.
The tiny Pacific island nation of Tuvalu, which risks complete disappearance due to rising sea levels (and perhaps coincidentally is one of the few countries to still have relations with Taiwan rather than the PRC), submitted a proposal for an amendment to the Kyoto Protocol that would have demanded deep, legally binding emission cuts from all countries, both “developed” and “developing”.
Tuvalu’s proposal was supported by the EU, other small island states and quite a few African countries, but it was strenuously opposed by China, alongside India, Saudi Arabia and several other large emitters. After two days of debate Tuvalu’s proposal was rejected, in spite of noisy demonstrations in its favour outside the congress venue.
This set a pattern, which would be seen again and again in the following years, of very poor countries and small island states, which pollute very little and are particularly vulnerable to climate change, teaming up with the relatively progressive EU against China and the other big polluters of the “developing world”, which have every interest to resist pressure to decarbonise.
At the following major climate change summit, the COP17 held in Durban in 2011, China and India initially argued in favour of extending the Kyoto Protocol, which made no demands on them, beyond its deadline in 2020. Eventually however they consented to the creation of a new treaty, to be signed in 2015.
The new treaty, which came to be known as the Paris Agreement, no longer made such a strict division between developed and developing countries, demanding that both groups submit national plans for emissions reduction. The agreement also pledged to keep global warming “well below” 2 degrees, while “pursuing efforts” to keep it below 1.5 degrees. The Chinese delegation was hostile to the idea of including any mention of 1.5 degrees as a goal, but it relented in the face of widespread support even from countries like the US and Australia.
China submitted its own national plan under the Paris Agreement in 2016, promising to achieve a series of targets by 2030. The targets included China peaking its carbon emission “around 2030”; ensuring that at least 20% of its energy came from non-fossil fuel sources by that year; and reducing its carbon emissions per unit of GDP by 60-65% compared to 2005. It must be noted that the last target is not absolute, but relative: if China’s GDP triples between 2005 and 2030, then its total emissions can still increase significantly even if this goal is met.
These targets, which were revised slightly upwards in 2021, are almost certainly going to be achieved well in advance of 2030. But then again, they are not particularly ambitious targets compared to what China has the potential to do. If this is all the world’s biggest emitter can do, it will simply not be enough to prevent the world from heating up by more than 2 degrees, provoking disastrous climate change.
For a while the election of Donal Trump, who famously called climate change a Chinese hoax, made China look like the sensible superpower by comparison. Trump’s announcement that the US was pulling out of the Paris Agreement in 2017 helped to focus the world’s outrage on America. Especially given the Chinese regime’s newfound (and genuine) determination to clean up China’s air, soil and water and become a leader in low-carbon technologies, many thought China was going to become the global leader of the fight against climate change. Then in January 2021, on his first day in office, Biden announced the US was rejoining the Paris Agreement, and perceptions shifted once again.
Meanwhile China has continued playing the “developing country” card, and being unenthusiastic about excessively ambitious climate targets. During the COP26 summit in Glasgow, in 2021, China teamed up with India to object, at the last minute, to the final resolution including a call to “phase out” unabated coal power and fossil fuel subsidies. As a result, the final wording was changed to “phase down”. COP president Alok Sharma was seemingly on the verge of tears, as he said that “China and India will have to explain themselves and what they did to the most climate-vulnerable countries in the world”.
In the COP27 in Egypt, in 2022, the big battle ground became the proposal by China and several other developing countries to establish a so-called “Loss and Damage Fund” to help vulnerable countries mitigate the damage from climate change. The proposal, which responds to a very real need that the world’s most vulnerable countries have expressed again and again, was controversial because it stated that only the “developed countries” would contribute to the fund, while all “developing countries” according to the 1992 definition would receive money from it.
Unsurprisingly, American and European negotiators argued quite strongly that China should be a contributor to the Loss and Damage fund, not a recipient of its aid. The prime minister of Antigua and Barbuda, speaking on behalf of the association of small island states, agreed, calling for both China and India to contribute to the fund. China’s envoy said the country had “no obligation to participate”. The Loss and Damage fund was finally established this year, with several countries pledging large sums, although it still falls far short of what’s needed. China has yet to contribute, and it is unclear if it will.
Another worrying trend that has emerged in recent years is the Chinese authorities’ willingness to make cooperation on climate change, particularly with the US, a bargaining chip conditional on unrelated political issues. The clearest example of this occurred in August 2022, when they unilaterally suspended all bilateral talks on climate change with the US, including a planned working group, in response to Nancy Pelosi’s “provocative” visit to Taiwan. The working group finally kicked off a couple of months ago, after relations between the two countries improved somewhat.
During the recent COP28, the Chinese authorities doubled down on their usual talking points. The ground was laid in October, in the run-up to the summit, when an official from China’s Ministry of Ecology and Environment, speaking at an official press conference, said that developed countries have an “unshirkable responsibility for global climate change”, and that the COP28 should “respect the starting points and national conditions of each country”, code for not asking too much of developing countries. He then called on the developed countries to finally fulfil their pledge to provide $100 billion for poorer countries to adapt to climate change.
The failure to fulfil that pledge, made in Copenhagen in 2009, is often brought up by Chinese officials. The promise was that the developed countries would provide $100 billion in “climate finance” annually to developing countries by 2020. The funds were supposed to help poor countries mitigate the effects of climate change and cut their own emissions. In practice, the funds provided totalled only $83 billion in 2020 even by the most generous assessment (and there is, of course, controversy over how the sum is counted).
In the end, the $100 billion target was probably met in 2022. It is, in any case, a totemic target that is quite unable to meet the needs of poor countries. Most serious analysis finds that the total sum needed for developing countries to shift to low-carbon economies and adapt their infrastructure to the extreme weather we are all going to face will run in the range of 2 to 6 trillion dollars by 2030. That would be 20 to 60 times the amount pledged for 2020.
The fact that all the “developed countries” put together were unable to step up and provide the sum promised by 2020, 11 years after the pledge was made, certainly doesn’t bode well for the seriousness with which such commitments are taken, or the way in which countries coordinate to achieve them. It is a failure which does not create trust, or make it easier for the West to take the moral high ground.
But the way that Chinese representatives have been, again and again, using this failure as a rhetorical argument looks very much like a way to deflect blame and drive a wedge between the “developed” and “developing” nations, while trying to position themselves as the leaders of the latter group. This is obviously not a constructive approach that can actually solve anything.
As with many other things, when it comes to climate change the men who run China take an adversarial stance towards the West, presenting their country as a scapegoat.
It is of course not hard for them to find fault with the West. The climate-illiteracy and recklessness displayed by several Republican administrations in the US, from Bush rejecting the Kyoto Protocol to Trump rejecting the Paris Agreement, has often made the point for them. More in general, Western countries’ efforts to decarbonise got going in earnest way too late, and they are doing too little to aid the poor countries that have contributed very little to climate change and are most vulnerable to its effects.
But none of this is a good reason for China to pass the buck. Chinese officials consistently claim that the West bears the greatest “historical” responsibility for climate change, and thus should be expected to bear most of the burden of decarbonisation. While it’s not an absurd argument, one problem with it is that China has been polluting so much over the past decade or two that even its share of historical emissions has become quite significant.
China share of all the world’s cumulative carbon emissions from 1850 to 2021 was 11.4% (and rising), according to one estimate. Only the US, with 20.3%, took up a bigger share. To get around this fact, Chinese officials have sometimes pointed to figures on “historical per capita emissions”, which are indeed still much lower for China than for Western countries.
The real problem with focusing on historical emissions, of course, is that humanity can do nothing about them anymore. We can still do something about current and future emissions, however. The claim is often made that China is a uniquely “pragmatic” country. Pragmatically, there is no way that we are going to address climate change if the country that produces a third of the world’s carbon emissions doesn’t decarbonise. Casting historical blame on the West is not going to change that fact.
There is a real divide between the rich, post-industrial world and the poorer, industrialising countries in terms of how to deal with climate change, and who should pick up the bill. China did not create this divide. Countries like India, Indonesia, Brazil and the oil-producers in the Gulf all have an interest in demanding that the Europeans, Americans and Japanese take up most of the responsibility, and want some leeway to continue exploiting fossil fuels for their own development.
In the case of countries like India and Indonesia, which still have very low emissions per capita and high levels of poverty, it is easier to sympathise with their point that they need to think about their economy first, and that they have historically not been the ones to cause climate change. But for China, which is now in a class of its own in terms of carbon emissions, arguments of this kind appear much less convincing.
And yet China’s leaders appear determined to continue positioning China as a “developing country”, with less of an obligation to stop polluting. Given Xi Jinping’s recent claim that China will be a developing country “forever”, and the importance of this label in his vision of China as central to a new international order no longer dominated by the West and its values, this seems unlikely to change.
What is most frustrating is that, given China’s recent efforts to decarbonise its own economy and become a global leader in renewable energy and green technology, a less confrontational approach would probably have served China better and allowed it to become a convincing and respected leader in global climate diplomacy, while not requiring it to do anything more than it is already doing at home.
In all this, one can only imagine what kind of an impact the nightmare scenario of a new Trump presidency could have. By shattering any chance of a united US-EU front on climate change, and putting the spotlight on the US and its insane, climate change-denying president, it would probably lessen the pressure on China. But hopefully the horror of another Trump victory won’t come to pass. If it does, it might just tip the world over the edge for good.
bona honesta artikolo. ĉar honesta ĝi plaĉos nek al okcidentantoj nek al ĉinoj
renato