As the US yields on climate leadership, China rises to fill the void

The COP29 conference — the latest round of international climate change talks, held this year in Baku, Azerbaijan — pushed past its Friday deadline and ended over the weekend with a new commitment to raise $300 billion a year by 2035 to help developing countries cope with the effects of warming and transition to cleaner energy. 

“In a year of geopolitical fragmentation, people doubted that Azerbaijan could deliver. They doubted that everyone could agree,” said COP29 President Mukhtar Babayev during the conference. “They were wrong on both counts.”

Yet despite the host country’s optimistic read on the summit’s conclusion, many delegates and activists were furious with what they saw as a meager investment.  Yes, the new commitment is triple the current climate finance agreement of $100 billion per year. But wealthy countries were already two years behind in meeting that original goal, and the new target is still far short of the firm $1.3 trillion that developing countries have campaigned for years to secure. 

“It is sad that after months of negotiations, they have waited till the last official day of COP to table a dismal figure, leaving no sufficient time for deliberations amongst parties, and to make it worse, the figure is shockingly too low,” said Rohey John Manjang, environment minister for the West African nation Gambia, in a statement.

The negotiations also once again failed to reach an accord on reducing consumption of fossil fuels that are contributing to the warming of the planet. 

The climate talks echoed the COP28 meeting last year in the United Arab Emirates in that they were again held in a country whose economy depends on oil. Azerbaijan gets two-thirds of its revenue from oil and gas production, and a COP host was once again accused of using the proceedings to forge fossil fuel export deals. COP29 was also one of the most well-attended climate meetings, with 66,000 registrants, though it’s down from the record 80,000 attendees at last year’s talks. Like 2023, this year’s negotiations concluded near the end of what’s likely to be the hottest year on record.     

COP29 faced additional complications. After a plateau and hopes of a decline, global greenhouse gas emissions are rising again and are likely to continue climbing. To meet the target of the Paris climate agreement to limit warming this century to less than 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 degrees Celsius) above pre-Industrial levels, humanity would have to cut emissions by more than half by 2030. According to a survey of scientists who contributed to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, most now think this goal is out of reach. 

With the US presidential election of Donald Trump, the world’s second-largest greenhouse gas emitter is also likely to back out of the Paris agreement altogether. Trump would be fulfilling a campaign promise after President Joe Biden brought the US back, following Trump’s withdrawal during his first term. Trump also wants to expand fossil fuel production and may cut incentives for clean technologies like electric vehicles.

Behind all this, the urgency to address climate change has only grown. 2024 has been a year of major disasters like heat waves, hurricanes, coral bleaching, flooding, and wildfires, events whose raw ingredients are poised to become more powerful in a warming world. 

These disasters are already having major economic effects. And further changes to the climate are likely to have some of their most acute effects — rising sea levels, more extreme rainfall, extraordinary heat waves — on the countries that contributed least to the problem. But as the US steps back, other countries like China are preparing to step up. 

A smaller role for the US, and a bigger part for China

The COP29 conference began after the US election, so the US negotiators were still part of President Joe Biden’s team, and they worked to nail down as much as they could before he leaves office in January. They highlighted how the US has made the single-largest clean energy investment in the world through the Inflation Reduction Act. 

US negotiators noted that the US is contributing $11 billion to the pool of international climate financing, exceeding its share of the promised $100 billion pool funded by wealthy countries. The US also emphasized its goal of tripling its nuclear energy compared to 2020 levels by 2050 and made progress in ratcheting down emissions of methane, a greenhouse gas that’s about 30 times more potent than carbon dioxide when it comes to trapping heat in the atmosphere.  

Biden himself, though, didn’t attend the talks. He was instead at the G20 summit in Brazil, where he visited the Amazon rainforest and pledged an additional $50 million to protect it.

Biden acknowledged that his successor wants to undo many of his climate initiatives, but noted in a statement that many cities and states will pick up the mantle on climate change, and many aspects of the transition to cleaner energy sources are unstoppable. Solar energy’s growth continues to defy forecasts, wind energy is competitive with fossil fuels in some markets, and EVs are getting more popular around the world. “While some may seek to deny or delay the clean energy revolution that’s underway in America and around the world, nobody can reverse it — nobody,” Biden said. 

Yet under Biden, the US has also reached record high levels of oil and gas production and maintained tariffs on Chinese clean energy products like solar panels and electric vehicles. Even with the pause on new liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports, the US is on track to double LNG exports by 2030.   

Trump wants to impose even more tariffs on China, which would further raise the prices of imported EVs and make many of the essential components of clean energy systems, like batteries and steel, more expensive. 

But as the US steps back from the international stage on climate change, China is gearing up to fill the void, emphasizing a willingness to work with other countries. China sent nearly 1,000 delegates to COP29. It already reigns supreme in solar energy, wind power, batteries, and electric vehicles, both for its domestic consumption and for exports, and it’s hungry for new customers.

China, the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter, will likely see a drop in carbon dioxide output this year, but it’s not clear whether this trend will continue. Like the US, China is experiencing growing energy demands from its tech sector, particularly from technologies like artificial intelligence.

The next round of climate talks is scheduled for 2025 in Belém, Brazil, where countries are supposed to come to the table with even more ambitious goals for curbing their greenhouse gases. But setting even tougher targets doesn’t mean much if countries are breaking their existing promises and emissions continue to rise. 

“I had hoped for a more ambitious outcome — on both finance and mitigation — to meet the great challenge we face,” said UN Secretary-General António Guterres in a statement. “I appeal to governments to see this agreement as a foundation — and build on it.”