President Xi Jinping of China has long taken pleasure in poking fun at the West’s short political attention span in confronting long-term challenges such as climate change. Western diplomats told me that in 2017 he regaled a delegation with a story about how President Barack Obama had traveled to Beijing to attempt to pressure China to cut its greenhouse gas emissions faster, only to be followed by President Trump, who downplayed the threat of climate change.
The point was that in contrast to the West, where election cycles have constrained consistent climate action, China plays a long game — planning decades into the future. And it doesn’t like to make promises it can’t keep.
This week, at the United Nations General Assembly, Beijing offered the world a glimpse of how it plans to cut greenhouse gas emissions in the years and decades ahead with a pledge to reduce them by 7 to 10 percent by 2035.
Such a modest commitment is frustrating to environmental advocates and Western leaders alike, who see it as falling short of what the climate crisis demands. In one sense, they’re absolutely right. China is the world’s biggest polluter and single-handedly burns more than half of the world’s coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel. According to my organization’s research, China would need to slash its emissions by at least 30 percent from peak levels by 2035 to align with the Paris agreement’s target to limit average global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. Beijing’s new pledge clearly misses that mark.
Yet to judge China’s climate ambition by the new pledge alone is to miss the far more consequential economic story: China has become the world’s clean tech superpower. Its dominance in the solar, battery and electric vehicle industries should allow it to move faster on climate and help much of the rest of the world use fewer fossil fuels, too. While the West is distracted and divided, China is focused and surging ahead.
There are reasons for China’s choice to set a conservative target. Domestically, China’s economic slowdown, particularly in provinces reliant on heavy industry, has made its leaders wary of climate actions that could jeopardize growth.
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