China Is Miles Ahead on Green Energy. Will It Also Lead on Climate Diplomacy?

Some 50,000 representatives from governments, multilateral institutions, businesses and civil society are gathering in Belem, Brazil this week to officially kick off the U.N. Climate Conference. This year’s edition—known as COP30, or more formally the 30th meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the 1992 U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change—is being framed by organizers as the “implementation COP”: Rather than aim for a new grand bargain, negotiators will try to rachet up commitments to climate action and finance under existing multilateral frameworks.

The United States under President Donald Trump, who has falsely labeled climate change a “hoax,” is snubbing the meeting despite increasingly alarming scientific reports of global heating and a sharply rising number of high-impact climate-related disasters. Yet even as America turns away from climate change mitigation and adaptation efforts, China has established a dominant position as the world’s leading investor into green energy technologies. The question now is whether it will step into the breach left by Washington on climate diplomacy.

Uneven Climate Progress

For three decades, the annual climate conferences have slogged through contentious, even acrimonious negotiations to find a path to global cooperation. From the beginning, the potential for “catastrophic climate change” has been framed as a pollution problem: the build-up of planet-warming greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, mainly from the burning of fossil fuels. Addressing this issue required costly investment in abatement technologies or a switch to zero-carbon but significantly more expensive energy sources like solar and wind. In business terms, the climate problem was a cost center. The vexing question for climate diplomacy: Who would pay?