China’s G-20 climate wrecking tactics threaten its global role

Beijing went from an antagonist in climate negotiations to an ally and even leader in recent years. It now appears to be getting cold feet.

At a disastrous Group of 20 climate ministers’ meeting in the southern Indian city of Chennai last week, China’s negotiator teamed up with Saudi Arabia and refused to discuss a 2025 global emissions target, according to a report in the Financial Times. An unnamed person familiar with the talks was quoted as describing the negotiator as a one-man wrecking ball. “I am leaving Chennai disappointed,” the European Union’s environment commissioner Virginijus Sinkevičius wrote on the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. “We expect global solidarity.”

China accounts for nearly a third of the world’s emissions and 196% of the increase in global greenhouse pollution since 2019. Despite that, its vast investments in renewable power and desire to lift its prestige on the world stage have raised certain expectations. Namely, that Beijing may help push for a consequential outcome at this year’s COP28 UN climate meeting in Dubai in December.

Bloomberg

From the nadir of the 2009 Copenhagen United Nations climate summit (when China was widely blamed for the failure to reach an agreement), it rose to be a key ally in hammering out the Paris Agreement with the US in 2015, before further committing to net-zero emissions in 2020.

Any retreat from that status would be disastrous not just to the world’s climate trajectory, but also to President Xi Jinping’s vision of China’s global role. Xi wants to see the country move from the sidelines of international affairs to center stage, a position more befitting its status as the second-largest economy with the second-largest population.

Over the past decade, climate has worked as a sort of sandbox for Beijing to practice this so-called “major-country diplomacy,” demonstrating its responsible leadership to smaller and poorer nations and earning credibility that might support broader ambitions to reshape global institutions in its favour. The behaviour in Chennai diminishes its status on that front.

Bloomberg

At the same time, it’s not completely unexpected. China and India teamed up at the COP26 climate conference in Glasgow in 2021 to block a commitment to phase out fossil fuels, points out Thom Woodroofe, a former climate diplomat and founding director of the Asia Society’s China Climate Hub.A promised 2025 global emissions peak doesn’t quite match China’s plan for emissions to top out by 2030, he said, making it disappointing but less surprising that negotiators refused to consider the issue. The situation still “bodes very badly for a historic outcome for India’s presidency” at the G-20 leaders’ summit later this year, he said by e-mail. It “narrows the playing field” for COP28, reducing the probability of a diplomatic breakthrough: “Long gone are the days when China can hide behind the bifurcation of the developed and developing world as an excuse not to do more.”

China is in every sense now a major country in terms of its climate footprint. Even on a per-capita basis, its emissions are significantly larger than those in the EU, and not far behind Japan. It now has far more in common with major industrialised economies than those of the Global South.

As Sunak’s reversal in the UK indicates, though, every nation faces domestic as well as international constraints on its climate policymaking. China remains attached to a carbon-intensive mode of development, from dirty heavy industries that account for more than half of its greenhouse pollution; to use of real estate and infrastructure spending as a tool of economic stimulus; to a grid that still depends on near-limitless coal expansion thanks to the inadequacy of market reforms that could lift renewables’ share.

This helps explain the skepticism that often greets Beijing’s claims to climate leadership. While emissions from rich countries have fallen about 817 million metric tons since the Paris Agreement, China’s have risen by 1.5 billion tons, equivalent to three-quarters of the overall increase globally.

Bloomberg

Joining Saudi Arabia as a climate naysayer isn’t the answer, however. The extraordinary pace of renewables growth means that power sector emissions are likely to hit a ceiling this year, especially if China’s hydroelectric dams recover from the drought conditions that prevailed over the past 12 months. Oil consumption in 2023 has likely already maxed out and will see muted growth in the years to come as electric vehicles and a slower economic pace eat into demand. China’s own actions may be the reason the world hits the 2025 emissions peak its diplomats refused to discuss.

Xi and his senior officials speak often of the need to build an “ecological civilisation” domestically and “play an exemplary role” on climate issues internationally. The opportunity is within his grasp to turn the slowing and maturation of China’s economy into a success story that can boost its global standing. The alternative is to become just another industrialised country, raining disasters on less wealthy nations and earning their distrust through its unchecked pollution.

If the wrecking tactics in Chennai are repeated in Dubai in December, the world will know which path Xi has chosen.