A transforming China, conflicts in Ukraine and elsewhere, and irreconcilable clashes over money have put the prospects for progress at a new low.
Global power is fractured. Temperatures have risen to record levels. Bitterness and anxiety are rising in vulnerable countries lashed by deadly heat and floods.
This week, as presidents and prime ministers assemble at the United Nations General Assembly, they confront a vastly different world from the one that existed nearly 10 years ago, when nations rich and poor found a way to rally together around a remarkable global pact.
In that agreement, the 2015 Paris accord, they promised to act and acknowledged a bare truth: Climate change threatens all of us, and we owe it to each other to slow it down. Countries agreed to nudge each other to raise their climate ambitions every few years, and the industrialized nations of the world — which had prospered from the burning of coal, oil and gas — said they would help the rest of the world prosper without burning down the planet.
Turns out, geopolitics can be as unpredictable as the weather.
Three big things have shifted since the climate accord that, together, have sunk the prospects of global climate cooperation to a low point. China has raced ahead of every other country, including the United States, to dominate the global clean-energy supply chain, fueling serious economic and political strains that undermine incentives to cooperate. Rich countries have failed to keep their financial promises to help poor countries shift away from fossil fuels. A widening gyre of war — from Ukraine to Gaza and now, in Lebanon — has become an impediment to global climate consensus.
“Major emitting countries are much less likely to work cooperatively on climate due to geopolitical tensions and concerns about supply-chain security than they were in 2015,” said Kelly Sims Gallagher, a former White House adviser who is now dean of The Fletcher School at Tufts University.
Then there’s the biggest, most consequential uncertainty of all: the coming U.S. elections.
China is the world’s largest producer of solar panels. Also wind turbines. Also batteries for electric vehicles. It manufactures more electric cars, buses and motorcycles than any other country.
It also processes the vast majority of the world’s cobalt and lithium, essential components in the batteries that will help electrify everything from trucks to factories to advanced weaponry.
In short, it holds the keys to the treasure chest of the renewable-energy transition, even as, paradoxically, it burns more coal than any other country. That makes China the biggest emitter of greenhouse gases at the moment, while the United States is the biggest emitter in history.
China’s dominance of clean-energy goods has sparked a protectionist backlash few would have expected when the Paris accord was signed in 2015 — with the U.S. and China as two of its most important backers. Today, however, Western countries, fearing that they will fall even farther behind, have imposed nearly insurmountable tariffs on China’s electric vehicles. And they have sought to eliminate Chinese-processed metals from their own factories.
That has added a new stumbling block to climate diplomacy between the world’s biggest emitters. It’s not helped by rising tensions between Washington and Beijing. The two sides are still talking, but they’re not agreeing on much. The global energy transition is getting bogged down as they quarrel.
“There’s no question that geopolitics are more challenging than they were when the Paris Agreement was struck,” said Ani Dasgupta, president of the World Resources Institute.
But he took pains to note that many countries continue to push the world’s powerful to come together, and with some success. “The biggest change, and a welcome one, we have seen since Paris is the rise of climate leadership from the Global South,” he said, referring to low-income nations that often feel disproportionate effects from global warming.
Money has bedeviled climate diplomacy for decades. There has been intense disagreement over who should pay, and how much.
A handful of countries — the United States, most of Europe, Canada, Australia and Japan — are responsible for most of the greenhouse gas emissions that have caused the planet to heat up over the past century. But each of those countries, in their own way, argues that they alone can’t foot the bill for a global fix.
They also argue that China in particular, now the world’s second biggest economy and its biggest polluter, should also pony up money to aid low-income countries.
The one explicit acknowledgment of this obligation has been the creation of a formal Loss and Damage Fund to help poor countries cope with climate disasters made worse by the greenhouse gases emitted by wealthy nations. A little over $700 million has been pledged, a drop in the bucket of what it costs even one country to recover from one climate disaster. (The European Commission allocated $10 billion this week to help Central European countries respond to the latest floods.)
Recently, a few courts have begun to take up cases that strive to penalize the industry or require fossil fuel companies to help pay the cost of fighting climate change. But even if the plaintiffs were to prevail, any decisions would likely be years in the future.
Meanwhile, the costs of climate change have piled up for low-income countries, many of which are also heavily indebted. On average, African nations are losing 5 percent of their economies because of floods, droughts and heat, according to the World Meteorological Organization. Many are spending up to a 10th of their budgets managing extreme weather disasters.
“For developing nations, especially those on the front lines of climate disasters, this is not just an injustice, it’s a betrayal of trust and humanity,” said Harjeet Singh, global engagement director at an activist group called the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine has lifted energy security to the top of the agenda for big world powers. That has both strengthened the argument to shift to renewable energy — but also shifted the focus of many world leaders from emphasizing a transition away from oil and gas to making sure they have enough of it for their energy needs.
It has also buoyed the fortunes of oil and gas producers worldwide. At the same time, food and fuel costs have risen worldwide, and with it, hunger.
If the war in Ukraine scrambled the economics of the energy transition, then the war in Gaza scrambled its politics, driving up distrust and realigning geopolitical allegiances. Western hegemony over global trade, including of fossil fuels, has faded.
Both China and India, as well as Turkey and Iran, two sets of rivals, have made deft energy deals with Russian President Vladimir Putin, allowing Russian oil and gas to enjoy new markets as Europe weans itself from Russian energy. The United States has, in turn, sought to counter that new dynamic by exporting more of its own oil and gas than ever.
This week at the United Nations, there are likely to be some pointed reminders to world leaders, particularly from the 20 largest economies, known as the G20, to rally around climate action.
The United Nations’ top climate official, Simon Stiell, whose grandmother’s home in on the Caribbean island of Grenada was destroyed by Hurricane Beryl earlier this year, said as much in a recent speech. “It would be entirely incorrect for any world leader, especially in the G20, to think, ‘Although this is all incredibly sad, ultimately it’s not my problem,’” he said.
The wildest wild card in all of this is what happens in November, when Americans go to the polls.
In his first term as president, Donald Trump pulled the United States out of the global climate accord. Should he return to the White House, he has promised to do so again.
As Tim Benton, a fellow at Chatham House, a London-based research organization, wrote recently, “a new Trump administration promises only — directly and indirectly — to frustrate ambitious, effective climate policies in the U.S. and abroad.”
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/23/climate/climate-diplomacy-fracture.html
