The U.S. and China Aren’t Talking Climate. Should We Worry?

ENB Pub Note: We do not agree with everything in opinion pieces, but we do want all sides heard.

Pro-Beijing supporters demonstrated outside the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office over the recent visit of U.S. Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

Anthony Kwan/Getty Images

About the author: Alex Wang is a professor of law and faculty co-director at the Emmett Institute for Climate Change and Environment at the UCLA School of Law.

China suspended bilateral climate talks with the U.S. on Aug. 5, in the wake of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan. Should we be concerned, as media reports have suggested? For a number of reasons, this suspension will not have much immediate impact on global climate action, but we should still hope the talks resume quickly. The stakes are simply too high for the world’s two largest emitters not to engage in regular and intensive discussions on climate change.

Why then shouldn’t we be too worried about the cessation of talks in the near term? The first reason is that we are in a period where national carbon neutrality pledges are already in place, and domestic implementation is critical. In the U.S., bilateral climate talks will matter less than actions by Senate swing voter Joe Manchin, Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch, or Gavin Newsom and Greg Abbott, the governors of the two most populous states. The recently passed Inflation Reduction Act , the largest climate investment in U.S. history, sets the U.S. up to meet its climate pledges and reshapes our sense of global climate progress. The recent Supreme Court decision of W. Va v. EPA, however, shows a conservative, anti-regulatory court flexing its muscle. We don’t yet know how far the Supreme Court will go to constrain government regulatory power. Moreover, subnational action in places like California, Texas and beyond will determine how far the U.S. can go on climate action for better or worse.

In China, trends in coal use, nonfossil energy and electric vehicle deployment, power-sector and electricity-grid reform, industrial decarbonization, and carbon export will determine whether that country can meet pledges of peaking emissions before 2030 and achieving carbon neutrality by 2060. China will need to navigate regional disparities, bureaucratic fragmentation, and powerful vested interests to succeed. These are not the sorts of challenges that will be resolved in diplomatic discussions.

Second, competition between the U.S. and China is already reshaping the political economy of climate change in ways that could not be achieved via bilateral talks. Over the last two decades, China has invested heavily in clean technology development as part of a broader national policy to seek an edge in new economic sectors where no global incumbents yet exist and to bolster its energy security. This push has led to dramatic cost reductions on solar modules, wind turbines, and batteries that have transformed the economic calculus of a green transition in the U.S. and the rest of the world. U.S. concerns about the geopolitical implications of Chinese dominance in these areas have bolstered political support for President Biden’s climate policy and shaped the way the climate provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act are structured.

The U.S. and China are also now engaged in a battle for hearts and minds in the Global South framed in part around green development and diplomacy. China has reframed its Belt and Road Initiative as a green project, and the U.S. and the G-7 have countered with a Build Back Better World initiative that has climate as one of its pillars. On the Chinese side, this has involved major investments globally in rare earth metals mining and renewable energy. How the U.S. response to China’s investments will play out remains to be seen. For developing countries, the competing agendas from two big powers  may naturally lead to a hedging strategy in which engagement with both the U.S. and China brings about greater goods provision. We have seen similar developments in the vaccine-diplomacy context.

Another reason not to worry too much about the cessation of formal bilateral talks is that engagement between the two sides continues despite the friction between Washington and Beijing. American and Chinese research institutes, universities, and subnational jurisdictions continue to collaborate as they did during the lowest points of U.S.-China tension during the Trump administration. Furthermore, Americans continue to buy clean technologies from China and benefit from China’s manufacturing innovation and cost reductions. We might also add that the areas in which U.S.-China tensions or competition could harm climate action the most are generally beyond the scope of what the climate negotiators are empowered to handle. Those include trade disputes, security concerns, conflicts over human rights, and the like. These issues need to be handled sensitively, but they aren’t matters that can usually be resolved in climate negotiations.

That said, the U.S. and China are simply too important to global climate action to cease regular, robust engagement at the most senior levels of government. Through state-to-state discussions and research cooperation, U.S. climate envoy John Kerry and his Chinese counterpart, Xie Zhenhua, can push for collective commitments or pledges that spur other countries to act. The two countries famously did this in advance of the 2015 Paris climate negotiations. Work on important issues like methane mitigation, deforestation, power sector decarbonization, and the like can be productively forwarded through bilateral engagement. These are areas where collective work on standards, monitoring, and enforcement can make it easier for each side to achieve its goals. Finally, diplomatic talks remain important to surface critical differences and avoid harmful misunderstandings. As the impacts of climate change become ever more obvious in the form of extreme heat, wildfires, drought, glacier melt and more, we owe it to ourselves to use every tool at our disposal to confront the challenge, including diplomatic talks.

Source: Barrons