BAKU, Azerbaijan — The coming U.S. retreat from leadership on global climate policy comes amid a dawning reality: For much of the world, China already calls the shots.
Beijing’s decades-long effort to dominate the world’s clean energy economy is enabling it to woo tight business alliances with governments in Africa, Asia and Latin America — without insisting on the labor and environmental safeguards that the United States and European Union typically demand. Those countries, in turn, are taking China’s side in disputes with the U.S. and Europe about trade policies or efforts to make rich nations step up their international climate aid.
And as President-elect Donald Trump prepares to take office, promising to walk away from the Paris climate agreement, some diplomats at the U.N.-sponsored talks in Azerbaijan said they hope China will fill the void by championing steep cuts in greenhouse gas pollution. Trump has also pledged to shred Biden administration clean energy policies that were designed to weaken Chinese control of key technologies.
“We will need China’s continued leadership,” U.N. climate chief Simon Stiellsaid midway through the two-week COP29 summit that is expected to wrap up this weekend, in a speech that sought to anoint the country as a preeminent climate powerbroker. He urged Beijing to demonstrate to other nations that “stronger targets drive investment” — a message that, in a different context, might have served as a sales pitch for President Joe Biden’s big-spending clean energy policies.
China said it was ready to answer, without spelling out exactly how.
“China has contributed in addressing climate change,” Chinese Vice Minister of Ecology and Environment Zhao Yingmin said in an interview. “But in the future, China will do our best to contribute more.”
Its efforts so far have only strengthened China’s hand around the world — not necessarily in ways that will advance Washington’s and Brussels’ climate goals.
Already, China’s stranglehold over the minerals and technology underlying electric cars, batteries, solar panels and other clean-energy infrastructure has made it the top supplier for other countries looking to move their economies away from fossil fuels. That’s on top of controlling an overwhelming majority of minerals key to clean technology: 86 percent of battery, 81 percent of solar, 64 percent of wind and 69 percent of electrolyzer technologies are made in China, according to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
This dominance has allowed China to cement its influence with developing nations, overwhelming the more meager efforts by the U.S. and Europe.
China also deploys far more renewable power at home than any other country, with twice as much capacity under construction as the rest of the world combined, even as it continues to burn heaps of coal.
These trends will only be accelerated by Trump’s anticipated retreat to an “America First” posture, and by the fiscal constraints suffocating European capitals, veterans of global climate diplomacy said. They predicted this will give China an advantage not only in climate policy but in broader economic and security disputes. And it could lead to global climate progress rolling out in a way that serves China’s goals, benefiting its clean-technology industries while allowing fossil fuels to stay dominant for decades to come.
In 2020, for example, China pledged to reach 1,200 gigawatts of renewables capacity by 2030, more than double its capacity at that time. At its present pace, it will meet that target by 2025, and could boast as much as 1,000 gigawatts of solar power alone by the end of 2026, an achievement that would make a substantial contribution to the 11,000 gigawatts of installed renewable capacity that the world needs to meet the 2030 targets of the Paris Agreement. Fossil fuels now make up less than half of China’s total installed generation capacity, a dramatic reduction from a decade ago when fossil fuels accounted for two-thirds of its power capacity.
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When the International Energy Authority issued its assessment of the pledge to triple renewables globally by 2030, it pointed out that the 50 percent increase in global renewable installations in 2023 was largely driven by China. In 2022, China installed roughly as much solar photovoltaic capacity as the rest of the worldcombined, then went on in 2023 to double new solar installations, increase new wind capacity by 66 percent, and almost quadruple additions of energy storage.
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Within a decade, China had largely achieved its goal of dominating not only the production of solar and wind technologies, but it had developed a near monopoly on every aspect of the supply chains, including the mining and processing of the rare-earths and strategic minerals essential for the clean energy revolution. Today, China has more than 80 percent of the world’s solar manufacturing capacity. The extraordinary scale of China’s renewables sector output has driven down prices worldwide, and this is a key factor in reducing the cost barrier to renewable systems for poorer countries. Today China not only holds important positions in wind and battery technologies, but a Chinese company, BYD, has become the world’s biggest EV manufacturer, and China is poised to pose a formidable global challenge in all aspects of electric transportation to established vehicle brands.
But if China has been clear about the opportunity side of climate change, it has been less enthusiastic about cutting its own emissions: In the first two decades of the century, the economy remained overwhelmingly dependent on coal, and China argued that committing to major cuts in emissions would be an unfair constraint on its right to develop. That began to change with President Xi Jinping’s surprise announcement at the 2020 U.N. General Assembly that China would peak its emissions “well before” 2030, as it had promised in Paris in 2015, and in an important new offer, that it would aim for carbon neutrality by 2060. A radical renewables program would be essential to meeting those goals.
Because renewables offer competitive pricing to produce energy (as well as other benefits), we can allow the market place to bring about increasing clean energy and storage supplies. It seems to me to raise fears about China’s policies gaining influence in order to try to justify increasing public investments in renewables in the west is a guaranteed way to raise public distrust about climate change policies and ‘expert’ announcements. Take away the financial benefit from taking from the public fund and towards the private for those urging more renewables, raise that all-too-important trust.
Fears about China’s policies have little to nothing to do with climate change. It’s all about national economic strength, manufacturing, and trade deficits, and Trump himself is leading those fears about Chinese policies (and honestly, Biden wasn’t far behind – I was personally disappointed when he imposed tariffs in Chinese EVs, simply because it will delay EV adoption here by a decade at least).
Now, Trump WON’T use those fears to raise subsidies for renewables (unlike Biden), but by not doing so we WILL fall further and further behind China in renewables production (which massively subsidizes renewables and EVs, up to 9 times more than the U.S. – link below), which will result in a weaker economy and world standing for the U.S. in the future.
The U.S. public is reliably 45% Democratic, 45% Republican, with the other 10% notoriously fickle about where they stand. Four years of Trump immediately led to his loss in the next Presidential election, and it’s highly likely there will be a similar result with this term.
So, we could do nothing as you suggest, or we could increase help for fossil fuels in a time when renewables are increasingly gaining (as Trump will do), and which will only lead to definite Chinese future domination of the market, because we’re worried about the whims of the fickle 10% voting bloc – or we could try to reverse or just slow that trend – as we were doing with the IRA. But in any case, it’s out of our hands for the next 2 years at least with a fully Republican Presidency, Congress, and Supreme Court.
https://www.ifw-kiel.de/publications/news/chinas-massive-subsidies-for-green-technologies/
Prices are helping, but the transition isn’t happening nearly fast enough to prevent cataclysm. We need to implement the solutions at least 10 times faster (hundreds of times faster for agriculture & industry.) “The market” is the main proximal cause of climate catastrophe; to think it’s the solution is delusional & to say it is deception. Until we clear away such lies from discussions about how to avoid the collapse of civilization & nature, we’ll keep being unable to solve it.
As Bill McKibben has said, winning slowly is the same as losing.
There’s a story brewing in Pakistan. Governmental corruption plus the high cost and unreliability of fossil fuels (plus, likely low individual electricity demand) are creating a situation where consumer-level renewables are taking over the market. It’ll have the effect of further crashing the economic viability of their electrical sector, but that in turn will likely lead to even more renewables adoption.
Pakistan’s surprise solar surge shocks experts and grid
https://www.dw.com/en/pakistan-solar-power-renewable-energy-power-grid-v2/a-70885544
It’s definitely disrupting the old funding model:
“The way those power plants were planned and funded was to run a minimum amount of hours,” said Jones. Because they’re no longer meeting those minimum hours, the electricity they do provide is becoming significantly more expensive for the remaining consumers, Jones explained.
The US far right gave world leadership to China & a little bit to Europe decades ago. It’s good, because whether it’s the Confucian, practical heart of the country or something else, China is one of the few major emitters acting anywhere near sane on the issue.
Offshoring industry, one of the central strategies in the oligarchs’ quest for domination, is one action causing the slow destruction of the US empire, to which it has no loyalty despite owing its existence to the empire above all other countries & structures. Paradoxically, one of the chief motivations for the oligarchic actions causing the global shift to China is rich male white supremacy.
Solar elsewhere in the world (this product comes from Germany)
https://1a-1791.com/video/s8/2/_/p/D/0/_pD0u.caa.mp4
“The market” ie capitalism, isn’t the ultimate problem. But it sure as hell is the proximal problem, it sure as hell is utterly corrupt, & sure as hell is one of the main tools used by narcissistic psychopaths (which “the market” also has a huge part in creating) to cause climate catastrophe & all our other problems. Capitalism, objectification, hierarchy, & the other symptoms of the complex attachment-disorder, trauma- & developmental trauma-caused psychological condition of terror, rage, hatred, shame, addiction, sadism, et al, drive the problem; to think those same things can solve it is delusional. People epitomized by Elizabeth Warren, who think they can tweak capitalism a tiny bit to solve everything, understand neither the depth nor breadth nor direness and speed of climate catastrophe and the larger psycho-ecological crisis.
As an illustration of the complexity, just one level of one aspect of the crisis includes 6 powerful conservatizing institutions in our society: the patriarchal family; religion; didactic education; corporations including media; the military; and right wing- corporate- and oligarchy-controlled government (including courts). They’re all mutually reinforcing and are only limited by people recovering from each, unfortunately all siloed into their own reactive issues and mostly unaware of the unified cause of the problems. Each solution group, further split into factions, is fighting alone, outspent and overwhelmed, and can’t win unless they all recognize the root of the problem, join, and begin to take deep, massive, radical comprehensive action.