How climate-denier Trump may leave China to save the planet

To a sensible person, the most worrying aspect of the re-election of Donald Trump is his refusal to take climate change seriously. He says it’s a hoax and a scam.

There’s no denying that Trump’s decision to again withdraw America from the 2015 Paris Agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and limit the global average temperature increase to below 2 degrees is a setback.

Illustration by Simon Letch

It could tempt many other countries to give up their own efforts to reduce emissions. If the mighty United States has stopped trying, why should we bother? It could dishearten the rest of us, but I doubt it will.

On the contrary, it could prompt us step up our own efforts – something we needed to do even without the US government’s withdrawal. It will certainly stiffen the resolve of the Chinese, who’ve just been handed the vacant position of moral leadership of the world on climate action.

Which is funny when you remember the Yanks’ bipartisan obsession with stopping China usurping their place as the world’s top dog. Will they really take this lying down?

The more I think about it, the more convinced I become that our shift to clean energy is now unstoppable. For a start, as each day passes, we see more evidence around us that climate change is already upon us, not something that may or may not happen sometime in the future.

Who can forget the footage of Spain’s flooding? All those nice cars washed up in a muddy heap at the end of the street. An entire year’s rainfall in eastern Spain in less than 24 hours, leaving more than 200 people dead.

Our TV news is now dominated by stories of extreme weather events of every kind: cyclones, bushfires, floods, deadly heatwaves and droughts. How long before we see regular footage of houses falling into the sea? Not to worry, it’s all a scam. They fake the photos.

Cars are piled in the street with other debris after flash floods hit the region in the Sedaví area of Valencia, Spain.Credit: Getty

For another thing, the switch to clean energy is well under way in most countries, and it’s too late to stop it. In some developing countries – China, for instance – the move away from dirty fossil fuels, particularly coal, is being propelled by a popular revolt against air pollution.

Elsewhere, it’s being driven by straight economics: the rapidly declining prices of solar panels, wind turbines and electric vehicles. Why would anyone ever build another coal-fired power station?

Anyone who opens a new coal mine is taking a bet that it won’t become a worthless “stranded asset” long before it reaches the end of its useful life. I read that, had it not been for Russia’s attack on Ukraine, the world prices for oil and gas would have begun falling as demand for them declined.

Note, too, that there are limits to a US president’s ability to stop the move to renewables and efforts to reduce emissions. Emissions reduction is mainly a matter for the state governments. Some of them – including huge California – will persevere with their reduction schemes.

President Joe Biden’s dishonestly named Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 actually provides billions of dollars in subsidies for the manufacture of solar panels, wind turbines and batteries in America. Trump plans to abolish it, but a lot of money has already been spent and – whether by accident or design – it’s largely being invested in Republican states and congressional districts. He may not be allowed to cut it off.

And all that’s before we get to China – the great villain and hero of climate change. Although the vast mass of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere was put there by America and the other rich countries burning fossil fuels for the past century or two, when you come to the annual addition to the stock of harmful gases it’s a different story.

Although the Americans still fancy themselves as having the world’s biggest economy (actually, if you measure it more accurately, they’ve already been overtaken by China), and although their emissions per person are still far higher than China’s, they only come second in the comp to add the most to emissions.

Because China’s population is four times the size of America’s, and its economy has been growing much faster than America’s, China accounts for 30 per cent of the world’s annual emissions, compared with America’s 11 per cent. (Then comes India with 8 per cent, and the 27 countries of the European Union with 6 per cent.)

So what China does matters far more than what the US does. And China is big on both sides of the ledger. According to The Economist, its emissions rose by about 6 per cent last year. About half that comes from its power sector, mainly burning coal. Another third comes from factories, particularly steel foundries. Then come emissions from cars and lorries.

But although China is still building new coal-fired power stations, it has installed more renewable power than any other country, and is using big subsidies to encourage the trend. Chinese companies make 90 per cent of the world’s solar cells, used to make solar panels, 60 per cent of the world’s lithium-ion batteries and more than half of the world’s electric vehicles, The Economist tells us.

It’s because of China’s massive production of these things – for its own use and for export – that the move to renewables has become so much cheaper in other countries.

The rapid increase in China’s production of renewable energy makes it likely its emissions will soon stop rising, even before the government’s 2030 target date. So the next step is for it to start reducing annual emissions in pursuit of its pledge to eliminate net carbon emissions by 2060.

That won’t be easy, of course. But my guess is the Chinese will take great delight in showing the world how decadent the US has become.

Ross Gittins is the economics editor.

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