This article was produced in partnership with the Pulitzer Center. ocean reporting network.
Baku, Azerbaijan – The China Pavilion, one of the largest of dozens of exhibition spaces at this month’s 29th United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP29), will host international governments and Business leaders are visiting one after another. ). Inside the museum, in addition to handing out writings written on fans by calligraphers, there are also stuffed pandas and books about President Xi Jinping on display. Surrounded by national flags and red lanterns, guests drink green tea and exchange business cards with Chinese representatives.
Government ministers from Nigeria and Chad spoke alongside United Nations officials at the Pavilion’s High-Level Forum on Global South-South Cooperation. United Nations climate chief Simon Steele praised China for “leading by example” in clean energy investment in developing countries. “We need continued leadership from China” at COP29, where countries are trying to agree on new climate finance targets, and at COP30, to be held in Brazil next year, Stier said. China’s Ecology and Environment Minister Huang Runqiu signed a memorandum of understanding to invest in renewable energy in Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country.
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“The 19th century will be the European century, the 20th century will be the American century, and the 21st century will largely be the Asian century,” said Eric Solheim of the International Green Development Coalition for China’s Belt and Road Initiative.
The US delegation is largely a lame duck here. President-elect Donald Trump has said he will withdraw from the Paris Agreement, where these COP summits are held, and double oil and gas drilling. He also plans to raise tariffs on Chinese goods, including clean energy technology, and possibly sever normal trade ties with the country.
U.S. import barriers will hurt China’s economy in the short term. But in another sense, President Trump may be giving the Chinese government a gift. If the United States withdraws from international climate policy deliberations, China will gain even more influence. And if President Trump reverses some of the Biden-era climate manufacturing subsidies he calls the “Green New Fraud,” it could ultimately mean less competition from China in cutting-edge technology. There is.
China is “willing to play a more active role in global climate governance,” officials from the Resources and Environment Planning Agency said at a COP29 side event. In fact, some participants said the Chinese government has become more visible and aggressive in the negotiations this time than in past years.
The United States will give China, now the world’s second-largest economy and historically the second-largest emitter of greenhouse gases, the most cash under a new climate finance deal that calls for rich countries to help. We are seeking to join the group of developed countries that offer Financing adaptation measures in poor regions. But last week, China said it had already provided $24 billion to climate change projects in developing countries since 2016 and signaled it would continue to resist outside demands. The United States, which is leaving Paris, has little basis for rebuttal. The U.S. and Chinese delegation offices, which were located next to each other to facilitate FaceTime during the past two summits, will be separated this year.
talk to scientific american, Li Shuo of the Asian Social Policy Research Institute compared today’s climate politics to a “tricycle” made up of the United States, the European Union and China, and said the wheels in the United States are now coming off. “With two wheels, we can still make progress,” he said. “Therefore, we will see more realignment[between China and the EU]to set the agenda without the US.”
An isolationist United States could also present an opportunity for China’s soft power. Over the past decade, President Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road Initiative has invested $1 trillion in energy and infrastructure projects in 150 countries, gaining trade, resources and political influence. The United States is also active in many of these countries, but that may change under the Trump administration.
Project 2025, a second-term wish list drawn up by more than 100 former Trump administration officials, calls for cutting the U.S. Agency for International Development’s (USAID) budget below 2019 levels and for “all ) is called for. Directly or indirectly involved with Chinese organizations. ” It also seeks to refocus USAID’s climate change program on oil and gas.
Zhao Yingmin, China’s COP29 chief negotiator, spoke. scientific american He said the country’s Global South investment policy is “based entirely on our own capabilities” and “has nothing to do with other countries.” But Michael Ivenso, an energy transition analyst with the Nigerian mission, said cutting off aid to countries such as Nigeria, which hosts several USAID projects, would leave a “vacuum” for rivals such as China to fill. It is said that there is a possibility that it will be born.
He said that under the memorandum of understanding signed at COP29, China will build large-scale solar power plants in Nigeria funded by subsidies rather than loans. scientific american. China has signed similar instruments on climate change cooperation with 42 other developing countries. “When one force leaves, it creates an opportunity for another force to come in,” Ivenso said. “If the United States decides that’s what they’re going to do, and China enters that territory that they left, including perhaps Russia and other countries, then that’s a problem for them to deal with. .”
There are also tensions surrounding new technology. China already controls 80% of the world’s solar panel supply chain. Several Biden-era laws, including the Inflation Control Act, were aimed at helping U.S. companies compete in earlier markets such as batteries, electric vehicles and hydrogen fuel. However, President Trump has said he would repeal such laws. Moreover, the wide-ranging tariffs he has promised could turn the U.S. clean-tech industry into what Lee calls “a fat bird on an island,” protected from predation at home but unable to compete abroad. There is sex.
Repealing the Biden law could increase foreign investment in green energy by $80 billion and cost the United States $50 billion in lost exports, according to a report released this month by Johns Hopkins University. U.S. cleantech requires “greater cooperation, not a high-fence, small-yard mentality,” says LONGi, a major Chinese solar power manufacturer that opened a factory in Ohio with a U.S. company this year. said Zhang Haimeng, vice president of . “It doesn’t really help the development of my industry.”
The two US Congressional delegations that attended COP29 embodied these two conflicting visions. A delegation of four Republicans and one Democrat from the U.S. House of Representatives called for “unlocking America’s energy” with “trustworthy” technologies: natural gas, hydroelectric power, nuclear power, and “clean coal.” I promised. But a delegation led by Democratic Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse (Rhode Island) and Ed Markey (Mass. He said that he would take the initiative. Markey has promised a “hard fight” for the anti-inflation law in Congress, with 18 House Republicans voting in favor of it.
“If (China) has a plan and we don’t have a plan, we will lose,” he said. “We’re going to lose markets around the globe. We’re going to lose cutting-edge technological advances that would otherwise have been conceptualized here in the United States.”
