November’s COP30 gathering in Belém, Brazil, marks three decades since COP1 in Berlin in 1995, and raises a sobering reminder of how deep we’ve sunk into a climate morass of our own making amid non-stop warnings. The evacuation of millions of people and the deaths of at least seventeen due to Typhoon Ragasa’s rampage through the Philippines, Taiwan, and China couldn’t have been more pointedly timed as U.S. and Chinese leaders outlined their very different visions of the climate crisis to the UN General Assembly last week.
U.S. President Donald Trump spun lie after lie in his trademark adenoidal wheeze. He absurdly claimed that China somehow doesn’t use the wind power they produce: “Those windmills are so pathetic and so bad,” he said. “And most of them are built in China, and I give China a lot of credit. They build them, but they have very few wind farms. So why is it that they build them, and they send them all over the world, but they barely use them?”
It’s pointless to fact-check Trump, but here we go: in the first five months of this year alone, China actually installed enough wind power (46 GW) to power 30 million homes. This is on top of the eye-watering amounts of solar power that are also starting to lower emissions around the world.
The up-is-down logic of Trumpworld means that his rambling warnings that “If you don’t get away from the green energy scam, your country is going to fail,” reveal a truth in negative space: that the sky-high output of renewable energy from China now represents humanity’s only hope for any kind of survivable – “liveable” is a step too far – climate future.
So it’s not surprising that the climate community turned to Chinese President Xi Jinping’s speech for a much-needed dopamine hit, only to meet a wall of Chinese strategic hedging.
In some ways, Xi’s pledges were notable. It was the first time that China committed to absolute emissions limits across its economy – a step forward from earlier goals of reaching peak emissions by 2030 and decarbonizing by 2060.
Yet, many found his commitment to 7%-10% reduction in emissions, the tripling of solar and wind installation from 2020 levels by 2035, and the rapid increase of electric vehicles a little underwhelming.
Things on the climate front are so dire that any commitment at all counted for something. In the words of Joanna Lewis, a climate expert at Georgetown University: “Given the time we’re in and the political realities in the U.S., China could put forward a relatively modest target and still be viewed as taking climate change seriously.”
That’s true, but the relatively modest goals triggered complaints from those eager for someone – anyone – to take on climate leadership. “Even for those with tempered expectations, what’s presented today still falls short,” said Yao Zhe, global policy adviser at Greenpeace East Asia. “[B]ut what’s hopeful is that the actual decarbonization of China’s economy is likely to exceed its target on paper.”
Therein lies a key difference: unlike the eagerness for big announcements among Western leaders, China is frequently wary of public commitments while being orders of magnitude more proactive on the ground. The reality that emissions in China have actually fallen this year for the first time is a historic inflection point all the more notable for not being turned into a photo op.
More fundamentally, the massive rollout of Chinese new energy technologies around the world is changing the climate calculus in numerous countries, with relative technological backwaters like Nepal suddenly racing ahead of the rich West in their uptake of electric vehicles. In effect the much-decried state support that built these manufacturing sectors at scale represents a massive subsidizing of global decarbonization by Chinese taxpayers.
The fact that the dominant response from Western leaders has been whining about Chinese “overcapacity” reveals much about the indifference to the lives and futures of non-White people that has been the dominant feature of Western power for hundreds of years.
Trump’s Gadaffi-like filibuster included enough disinformation to make it a low point in U.S. climate leadership, but it’s worth remembering that the real difference between the Republicans and Democrats lies more in optics than policy substance. While Biden-Harris’s pious commitments to climate action contrasted with Trump’s smoggy glee, both administrations ended up increasing gas and oil production. More fundamentally, the fact that the United States allowed its climate action to be mired in endless culture wars will forever be an indictment of its democracy.
So, underwhelming or not, Xi’s commitments, and China’s additional support for initiatives like Brazil’s Tropical Forests Forever Facility, are pretty much the best thing we have going for us, despite China’s own ongoing coal addiction.
Meanwhile, Typhoon Ragasa was raging – one of the strongest storms in history. Until next year. And the year after that.
Cobus van Staden is CGSP’s Managing Editor.
