Climate politics: Why the old diplomacy no longer works

All of this is coming when the most dangerous big-power rivalry since the Cold War is escalating. The US regularly chastises China over its treatment of Uighurs in Xinjiang and its clampdown in Hong Kong, alongside threats to Taiwan, tensions in the South China Sea, and cyberattacks. The announcement of AUKUS – a joint US, Australia, UK project to build nuclear-powered submarines for Australia to deploy in the Indo-Pacific – has further exacerbated tensions.

Climate is surely the ultimate test of whether it is possible to simultaneously compete for dominance of the world and collaborate to save that world. If the US and China cannot work together on this, if they cannot bring other countries along with them, then where else can they? Logic dictates that without them coming together, no meaningful progress will be made, multilaterally or bilaterally. To put it another way, we are all doomed.

The evidence so far suggests that conventional diplomacy – a combination of carrot and stick, of the handshake and the megaphone – is not working fast enough. Yet all sides know they must act rapidly in order to prevent catastrophe, not least for their own populations.

The evidence so far suggests that conventional diplomacy – a combination of carrot and stick, of the handshake and the megaphone – is not succeeding. Yet all sides know they must act in order to prevent catastrophe, not least for their own populations.

The most likely triggers for radical change lie elsewhere. They are based on national self-interest. Which big power, which political system, will seize the mantle of the green global citizen? Which will seize the huge economic benefits arising from green technologies? These two challenges stem from rivalry and competition. The third one is self-preservation. At what point will populations begin to appreciate that inaction on climate is imperilling them? How bad will it have to get before they rise up and demand radical change, even in authoritarian states?

The major powers are at least trying old-fashioned diplomacy. In the first 100 days of the Biden presidency, the US held a series of talks with China. At the first meeting, in Alaska in March, China’s senior foreign-affairs official, Yang Jiechi, launched a tirade against Antony Blinken after the US Secretary of State attacked China’s human rights record.

In April, President Biden’s climate envoy, John Kerry, became the first senior official of the new administration to visit China, for talks with his counterpart Xie Zhenhua. President Xi Jinping then attended an online leaders’ climate summit convened by Biden. Kerry and Xie have talked, online and face-to-face more than a dozen times.

It remains unclear what these various meetings have achieved. Their most recent, in Tianjin at the start of September, was described as ‘constructive and detailed’ – about as good as it gets in the circumstances. So what are the prospects of one side coaxing the other to improve its climate performance?

First the positives. COP26 is taking place a year late due to the pandemic, and the time-lag has provided a certain distance from the Donald Trump era. Within days of taking office, Biden signed a series of executive orders on the environment, directing the government to make climate change a central issue of his administration’s economic and national security policy . Among its measures were orders to freeze new oil and gas leases on public lands and double offshore wind-produced energy by 2030, alongside fulfilment of a campaign pledge to re-join the Paris accords.

Secondly, the Biden administration insists climate talks can and must be separated out from other issues of concern. Kerry has sought to kill from the outset the notion that China could buy America’s silence on human rights and other issues as the price of cooperation on climate.

This tough line appears to be working as most Republicans and Democrats are holding to it, but civil society groups are challenging the approach. In July, 40 progressive groups wrote a public letter stating ‘nothing less than the future of our planet depends on ending the new cold war between the US and China’. China hawks were furious with the intervention.

China also made clear on the eve of Kerry’s Tianjin talks that any thought of splitting climate from other policy issues is a non-starter. Its foreign minister Wang Yi described joint efforts against global warming as an ‘oasis’ but added the oasis ‘could be turned into a desert very soon’. In case the Americans had not got the message, he summarized that China-US climate cooperation ‘cannot be separated from the wider environment of China-US relations’.

Biden’s tough talk on climate is more challenging than collaborative. His Plan for a Clean Energy Revolution and Environmental Justice calls for a series of audits of climate action around the world, ensuring those who do not fulfil, or actively undermine, the Paris Agreement pay the price. That is clearly aimed at China. Absent, however, are any particular incentives for China to look benignly on American pressure.

The third weakness is perhaps the most intractable. Even before the Afghanistan debacle, American power – hard and soft – is not what it was. Exhortations to China or to other countries do not have the effect they once did. Even US allies are doing their own thing. The European Union (EU) Green Deal is one of the most radical on offer while, by contrast, Australia – whose strategic importance in countering China in the Indo-Pacific is growing – is one of the world’s most defiant climate laggards.

The US failure so far to keep to its side of the economic bargain on climate has fuelled further misgivings. The Biden administration has struggled to persuade wealthy countries to meet their long-standing commitment to stump up $100 billion in climate finance per year to help poorer states deal with the effects of climate change.

They have been warned adaptation costs, currently estimated at $70 billion per year, could soar four-fold per year by 2030. Developing countries stress this funding is key to their ability and willingness to commit to ambitious climate targets, and therefore to broader ambitions of global net-zero.

The history of past climate conferences weighs heavily. Bernice Lee, an expert in China’s environmental politics points out that Beijing was castigated as the villain at the Copenhagen talks in 2009. Last-minute talks with the Obama administration ensured last-minute success in Paris in 2015.

China’s climate announcements since September 2020 have been less impressive. The Communist Party’s 14th five-year-plan, covering the period to 2025 and published in March 2021, mentions carbon neutrality only once in a 75,000-word text. And Xi’s recent UN speech broke new ground in only one specific area when he pledged China would build no more coal-fired power projects abroad.

Beijing has been under pressure to end coal financing overseas following similar announcements by South Korea and Japan. But this concession is relatively low-hanging fruit as recipient countries were becoming increasingly wary of such projects. And, as with Biden’s announcement on financing, the devil will be in the detail. Does the pledge apply only to state-funded projects, or will the government insist that Chinese private funding follows suit?

Choreography matters in moments such as these. China is keen to show its announcements are not because of pressure but are entirely on its own terms. ‘The Chinese won’t be pushed around’ says Mikko Huotari, executive director of the Mercator Institute for China Studies in Berlin, ‘nor will other countries. This is a game of waiting – and hoping for the signals’.

Experts say it must shut down more than 500 coal-fired plants within ten years to have any chance of reaching its climate targets and, for the moment, that is not happening. China is in the throes of a post-pandemic ‘smokestack recovery’. Emissions have grown at their fastest pace in more than a decade, increasing 15 per cent year on year in the first quarter of 2021.

Huotari argues the reliance on coal is based on wider considerations. ‘Resilience and energy security are paramount in Chinese policymaking. Coal has always been central to that,’ he says. ‘It is very hard to give up that mentality.’ Recently, ten provinces were forced to ration energy because of a slump in production, triggering alarm and pleas for more, not less, coal.

Isabel Hilton, founder and senior adviser at China Dialogue, summarizes the dilemma: ‘China is acutely aware of the opportunity side of climate change and has positioned itself for more than a decade to be the world’s dominant supplier of low carbon goods and services,’ she notes. ‘But domestically, despite a rapid deployment of renewables, the complicated economics of the transition in a country still heavily dependent on coal, and concerns about energy security in an increasingly tense world, appear to be slowing the pace of China’s effort alarmingly.’

The problem goes beyond economic considerations. As in the US, climate justice is gaining prominence in China, with a suspicion that jobs related to renewable energy and environmental transformation are less-well paid and have less social value than traditional industries. This reflects culture clashes playing out across the world between younger, greener, city dwellers and older, more traditional, citizens in ‘rust belt’ towns.

In the case of China that is predominantly, but not exclusively, in the north-east of the country, where an increasing nationalism is taking hold in which climate change is denounced as ‘Western pseudo-science’ and a conspiracy to stem China’s growth.

Set against that are the shocks experienced in recent years – in 2021 alone, wildfires raged in Canada and the US Pacific Northwest as temperatures topped 50 degrees, New York’s subway was engulfed by water, floods tore through German, Belgian, and Dutch towns and villages.

Importantly, this was in China too. On 17 July, terrified subway passengers in Zhengzhou stood in chest-high water as almost one year’s rain fell in just three days and more than 300 people were killed across Henan province. As a major transport hub, Zhengzhou’s lines were built only five years ago and were supposed to be able to withstand climate emergencies.

With a nod to its domestic audience, as well as to developing nations and the international community, China’s leadership demands others cut it some slack. It regularly falls back on the argument that it and similar countries are merely catching up and should not be subjected to the same strictures as the US and Europe which have been emitting far more for far longer.

What matters more – ongoing emissions or accumulated emissions? The US is historically the largest emitter, accounting for almost a third of global emissions. The EU – including the UK in the past – is at 22 per cent and China at 13 per cent. But China is catching up steadily and some estimates suggest if it continues at its current pace, by 2035 it will have overtaken all others – an ignominious milestone for China and devastating for the world.

Tim Benton, director of the Environment and Society Programme at Chatham House, warns of the parable of the frog and the scorpion. A scorpion wants to cross a river but cannot swim, so it asks a frog to carry it across. The frog worries that the scorpion might sting it, but the scorpion argues that if it did that, they would both drown. The frog agrees, lets the scorpion climb onto its back and begins to swim. Midway across, the scorpion stings the frog, dooming them both. It couldn’t help it, it said, it was in its nature.

The bidding war for green credentials will intensify and will contain virtue signalling and admonishments. The real challenge takes place after COP26 when climate issues may no longer dominate the media and it will become about more humdrum questions of complying with targets.

This is a proxy battle taking place within a wider cold war and the competitive instincts of the US and China propel both to try to outshine each other in new technologies and surprise announcements. Ultimately though, more would be achieved if suspicion reduced and collaboration increased. As Leslie Vinjamuri, director of the US and Americas Programme at Chatham House, points out, the world struggles to make meaningful climate progress in a vacuum.

This is the second in a series of three reports on cooperation in an era of rivalry, drawing on expert analysis and recommendations from Chatham House. The first report examined COVID-19 and vaccine nationalism.