(Left to right): Kate Logan, Jennifer Turner, Joanna Lewis, and Cecelia Springer

 

What’s Next for US-China Climate Relations

By Elaine Pasquini
Photo by Phil Pasquini

Washington: The Wilson Center’s China Environment Forum (WCCEF) hosted a panel on January 23, 2025, to discuss climate change, once a key area of US-China cooperation.

In the administration of President Barack Obama, there was a gamut of topics besides climate change that fostered bilateral collaboration between the United States and China which laid the groundwork for the US-China Climate Agreement in 2014, that, in turn, led to the Paris Climate Accord the following year, Jennifer Turner, director of the WCCEF, told attendees.

Joanna Lewis, associate professor of energy and environment and director of the science, tech, and international affairs program at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service and author of Cooperating for the Climate: Learning from International Partnerships in China’s Clean Energy Sector, was the first panelist to, give her views.

Despite having a new administration in the White House, Lewis stressed the need to continue to engage with China on climate change. Historically, the US has been able to talk to China “even though we don’t agree on a lot of other topics.”

While the highest number of agreements signed with China regarding climate change and energy were under the Obama administration, including creation of the US-China Clean Energy Research Center, there were others during George W. Bush’s term. No new accords on climate and energy, however, were signed in Donald J. Trump’s first years in office, she noted.

Within hours after taking office, President Trump withdrew from the Paris Climate Accord and issued executive orders “that go against international cooperation at large,” she said. “And some of the energy-focused executive orders which are more domestically oriented give us a sense of where the administration’s energy priorities lie.”

The US is going to continue to prioritize the areas of non-CO2 greenhouse gases and electricity system issues “even if we are not engaging directly with China,” Lewis stated. “And I do think there are other ways that we can continue to engage with the Chinese,” such as partnerships with research institutes, the private sector and, multilateral development banks.

Kate Logan, director of the China Climate Hub and Climate Diplomacy at the Asia Society’s Policy Institute, pointed out that the US is in a very different place than a decade ago when the Paris Agreement was adopted. “When Paris was adopted countries then put together their nationally determined contributions and then had to determine how to implement them based on whatever domestic political systems they had.”

“China has the five-year planning process which sets targets and then adopts measures to achieve those targets, whereas in the US because of the challenges domestically with using regulatory measures to implement climate action through a national level carbon price, we shifted our tack and went more toward the industrial policy direction,” Logan said.

According to Chinese Vice Premier Ding Xuexiang speaking at the World Economic Forum, one of the major trends for China’s economy is green and low-carbon transformation.

With the number of Trump’s executive orders, “it is unlikely that the US will be doing anything meaningful on something like climate finance or through multilateral development banks going forward,” she said.

Cecelia Springer, a non-resident senior fellow with the Global China Initiative at Boston University Global Development Policy Center, noted a climate policy would need more coordination between the US and China. “Now we’re in a low coordination and low impact era of US-China relations,” she pointed out.

According to Springer, one area for productive competition between the two superpowers would be climate and development in the Global South and also industrial decarbonization, manufacturing, and competitiveness.

“China has been the one stepping up to the plate in recent years,” she said. “Just in the energy sector, China has provided three times the amount of overseas power-generating capacity than the US in terms of development-financed power-generation capacity. China’s Belt and Road Initiative has deployed hundreds of billions of dollars since 2008 with the US being far behind to the extent that it even is a competition.”

Since the US is now suspending overseas development aid, Washington “may no longer have the ambition to lead in global development but that’s not to say this could be an area that should be advocated for under the current administration,” Springer stressed. In addition, Trump has partially dismantled the Inflation Reduction Act, which was meant to revitalize US manufacturing, especially green manufacturing.

The US should keep our eye on our green public procurement and green private procurement policies, she suggested “as this is outside the realm of policy and one area where I think there will be continued momentum.”

With respect to coal, she noted that Chinese-financed coal plants around the world are going to continue to operate for decades. The median age for Chinese-financed coal plants overseas is about 15 years. “But we know that coal plants around the world need to retire by 2040 according to the International Energy Agency to achieve our Paris Agreement climate targets,” she added.

One-third of coal use in the world in the last year is from power plants in China and about one-tenth goes to steel production there and more for other industries. In the end, Springer said, “China consumes about 50 percent of the world’s coal and is also producing about 50 percent of the world’s coal. So, the global ongoing reliance on coal is really a China story.”

In closing, Joanna Lewis noted that countries are supposed to be submitting the next round of their nationally determined contributions, targets, and pledges under the Paris Agreement by next month, and the real concern is what China’s target is going to look like because it is very much tied to what is happening domestically on coal. With the US withdrawal, “the fate of the Paris Agreement is in China’s hands,” she said.

(Elaine Pasquini is a freelance journalist. Her reports appear in the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs and Nuze.Ink.)