China plays hardball on climate

Josh Frydenberg’s observation at the ANU Crawford Leadership Forum on Monday – that Australia’s economic and security interests increasingly are overlapping in a new era of strategic competition – could be broadened further to cover climate and energy policy. In the lead-up to the November climate change summit in Glasgow, US special climate envoy John Kerry held cyber talks with Chinese officials last week. His aim was constructive – to negotiate an agreement between the world’s two largest emitters of greenhouse gases (China 27 per cent, the US 11 per cent) before the Glasgow meeting. The process failed.

Ahead of the talks with Mr Kerry, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi and Vice Foreign Minister Xie Feng presented a list of unrelated demands in meetings with US Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman. According to Chinese state media, Mr Xie handed Ms Sherman two lists – the “List of US Wrongdoings that Must Stop” and the “List of Key Individual Cases that China Has Concerns With”, with three bottom lines for US conduct towards China. China’s negotiating points – none of which was connected with greenhouse gas emissions or climate – were impossible for the US or any Western nation to endorse.

As Graham Lloyd wrote on Monday, China insisted that the US not “infringe” on Chinese sovereignty or its “territorial integrity” in regard to Hong Kong, Taiwan, Tibet and Xinjiang province, home to China’s suppressed Uighur Muslims. China also demanded that the US not “challenge, slander or even attempt to subvert” the path and system of socialism “with Chinese characteristics”. All unilateral sanctions, high tariffs and technology blockades against China were to be lifted, as were visa restrictions against Chinese Communist Party members. Among other demands, the US was to “stop suppressing the Confucius Institutes”, revoke the registration of Chinese media outlets as “foreign agents” and halt the extradition request for Huawei chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou, who was detained in Canada in 2018.

For his part, Mr Kerry wanted China to commit to the 1.5C limit of global warming targeted in the 2015 Paris Agreement, to agree to a definite time frame for carbon emissions to peak before 2030 and a moratorium on financing overseas coal-fired projects. Such issues were non-negotiable, China insisted, while other problems in the relationship remained. “The US side wants the climate change co-operation to be an ‘oasis’ of China-US relations,” Mr Wang said. “However, if the oasis is all surrounded by deserts, then sooner or later the oasis will be desertified.” If the largest greenhouse gas emitter takes the same attitude to Glasgow, the summit will be undermined from the outset. And according to a report released last month by the Helsinki-based Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air and the US Global Energy Monitor group, China is planning to build 43 new coal-fired power plants and 18 new blast furnaces, equivalent to adding 1.5 per cent to its current annual emissions.

The issue will ratchet up regional tensions. Three Quad members, the US, India and Japan, are among the top five producers of carbon dioxide emissions. Australia, a small player, has a major interest in coal. With China refusing to make meaningful concessions, India, which ranks third for greenhouse emissions, will be less inclined than ever to change course from its coal-fired economic revolution.

Conscious of Joe Biden’s political weakness in the wake of the Afghan debacle, Chinese President Xi Jinping’s government has linked climate change to strategic competition. It has made it clear, Greg Sheridan wrote on Saturday, that if Washington persists in countering China, Beijing will make sure Mr Biden fails in his climate ambitions. Beijing “used the same diplomatic judo on Barack Obama, effectively offering him ultimately meaningless climate commitments in exchange for Washington going soft on the South China Sea”, Sheridan pointed out.

In the US, the Democratic Party activist base wants action in Glasgow. So do many European countries and Britain. But if China, which produces more greenhouse emissions than the US, Europe, Britain and Australia combined, does not co-operate, the West would be making a major mistake, in the current strategic climate, if it tried to make up the slack. In challenging times, especially, a strong economy is the foundation of a country’s strategic weight. As with trade, China has shown it sees climate policy in terms of strategic competition.