Only China can now lead the world on climate

Unlock the White House Watch newsletter for free

Your guide to what the 2024 US election means for Washington and the world

The author is an FT contributing editor and writes the Chartbook newsletter

Remember January 2021? Joe Biden came into office loudly proclaiming: “America is back!” Antony Blinken, as secretary of state, was fond of remarking that “like it or not, the world does not organise itself”. The claim to US leadership extended across the board: to trade and defence, tech and climate. Given its huge per capita emissions, the idea that the US could really be a leader on decarbonisation stretched credulity. But the new mood in Washington was welcome.

Now, less than four years later, the Republicans rule the roost. On defence and trade policy there will be continuities from Biden to Donald Trump. But on climate, the US is once more halfway out the door.

As far as global environmental concerns go, the US has an irretrievably split personality. Far from organising the world, it will be the world that has to adjust to the disorganising impact of America’s polarised and depressingly unintelligent democracy. 

In the 1980s and 1990s American scientists did as much as anyone to define climate as the challenge of our times. But even as the Clinton administration was helping to prepare the first global climate agreement, the Senate passed the Byrd-Hagel resolution denouncing the UN treaty that exempted developing economies from taking costly climate action. The flagship Kyoto treaty was never even put to the Senate. 

In 2015, scarred by this experience, the Paris climate accords were framed specifically to work around Byrd-Hagel. The agreement does not require Senate ratification and is based on nationally determined contributions. Nevertheless, after running on a campaign that denounced the climate crisis as a Chinese hoax, in 2017 Trump announced the US would be pulling out of the pact.

In 2018, following their successful comeback in the midterms, the Democratic left rallied around the Green New Deal. But Trump’s popularity was barely dented — but for Covid he would surely have been re-elected in 2020. After months of wrangling, Biden did eventually manage to pass a historic package of green energy subsidies. But this was dressed up as the Inflation Reduction Act, larded with national protection specifically directed against China. 

America can claim to have co-invented modern renewables. Scientists let go by Nasa dreamt up modern solar in the 1970s. At the state level, California has a renewable share on a par with those in Europe. Backed by the Obama administration, Tesla made electric vehicles cool. 

But liking new sources of power is one thing. Being serious about the energy transition is quite another. The kind of tough-minded carbon pricing applied in Europe went out of style in Washington DC with the failure of Obama’s cap and trade proposal in 2010. America’s preferred energy policy is more, more, more, as cheaply as possible. After years of heavy investment in fracking, the US under Biden became the largest oil producer the world has ever seen. Trump plans to raise production by a further 3mn barrels. Decarbonisation of electricity supply will continue because wind and solar are now so much cheaper. But despite hurricanes regularly devastating parts of the country, any broader ambition to meet America’s climate targets is off the table. 

The inescapable conclusion of the past 35 years is that it is foolish to treat the US as a reliable partner in global climate policy.

During Biden’s honeymoon, the hope was that the US and Europe would act together. In Europe, outright climate scepticism is rare and the EU has built an impressive suite of subsidies and carbon pricing. The end of coal-fired power generation in the UK this year was historic. But in Europe too the cost of living crisis is swinging the political mood against tough climate action. The looming crisis in the European car industry, brought on by Chinese success in EVs, exposes the hypocrisy of a continent that promised a Green Deal while clinging to diesel. 

To varying degrees, both Europe and the US have failed to grasp the decarbonisation challenge identified by their own scientists decades ago. Insofar as there is to be a global climate leader it can now only be China, which is responsible for more than 30 per cent of global emissions and has mastered the green energy supply chain. Given mounting tension with the US, Beijing has every incentive to minimise oil imports. The key question is whether the Chinese Communist party can muster the political will to override its fossil fuel interests. If it can, it will not single-handedly solve the climate crisis but it will assert a claim to leadership that the west will find hard to answer.