This story was produced in partnership with the Pulitzer Center’s Ocean Reporting Network.
BAKU, Azerbaijan—A steady stream of international government and business leaders have been trekking to the China Pavilion, one of the largest among dozens of showcase spaces here at this month’s 29th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP29). Inside, a calligraphy artist inscribes folding fans to hand out, along with plush pandas and books by President Xi Jinping. Guests drink green tea and swap business cards with Chinese representatives amid flags and red paper lanterns.
At the pavilion’s high-level forum on global “South-South cooperation,” government ministers from Nigeria and Chad spoke alongside U.N. officials. U.N. climate chief Simon Stiell praised China for “leading by example” with its clean energy investments in the developing world. “We will need China’s continued leadership” at COP29, where countries are trying to agree on a new climate finance goal, as well as at COP30 next year in Brazil, Stiell said. China’s minister of ecology and environment, Huang Runqiu, signed a memorandum of understanding to invest in renewable energy in Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country.
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“The 19th century was the European century, the 20th century was the American century, and the 21st century will be, to a large extent, the Asian century,” said Erik Solheim of China’s Belt and Road Initiative’s International Green Development Coalition.
The U.S. delegation has largely been a lame duck here. Incoming president Donald Trump has said he’ll pull out of the Paris Agreement, under which these COP summits are held, and double down on oil and gas drilling. He’s also planning to raise tariffs on Chinese goods, including clean energy technologies, and, potentially, to break off normal trade relations with the country.
U.S. import barriers would be a blow to China’s economy in the short term. But in other ways, Trump may be giving Beijing a gift: U.S. withdrawal from international climate policy deliberations will allow China even greater influence. And if Trump overturns some of the Biden-era climate manufacturing subsidies Trump calls the “Green New Scam,” it could eventually mean less competition for China on cutting-edge tech.
China is “willing to take a more active role in global climate governance,” said an official from its resources and environment planning body at a COP29 side event. Indeed, some participants say Beijing has been more visible and assertive in the current negotiations than in previous years.
The U.S. has been pushing for China—now the world’s second-largest economy and second-largest historical emitter of greenhouse gases—to join the group of developed countries that will provide the most cash under the new climate finance arrangement, which urges richer nations to help fund adaptation measures in poorer ones. But last week China said it has already provided $24 billion for climate projects in developing countries since 2016, suggesting it will continue to resist any outside requirements. About to quit Paris, the U.S. has little grounds to argue. The U.S. and Chinese delegation offices, which were placed next to each other at the last two summits to encourage face time, are set apart this year.
Speaking with Scientific American, Li Shuo of the Asia Society Policy Institute likened today’s climate politics to a “tricycle” comprising the U.S., the European Union and China—and said the U.S. wheel is now falling off. “We can still make progress if you have two wheels,” he said. “So we’ll see more realignment between [China and the E.U.], and they will set the agenda without the U.S.”
An isolationist U.S. could also open opportunities for China’s soft power. Xi’s Belt and Road Initiative has invested $1 trillion in energy and infrastructure projects in 150 countries over the past decade, garnering trade and resources, as well as political clout. The U.S. is also active in many of these countries, but that could change under Trump.
Project 2025, a wish list for a second term created by 100-plus former Trump officials and others, calls for cutting the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) budget to 2019 levels or lower and for eliminating “funding to any [country] that engages with Chinese entities directly or indirectly.” It also seeks to refocus USAID climate change programs on oil and gas.
China’s lead COP29 negotiator, Zhao Yingmin, told Scientific American that the nation’s Global South investment policy “is fully based on our own capabilities” and “has nothing to do with other countries.” But if the U.S. ends aid to countries such as Nigeria, which hosts several USAID projects, that could create a “vacuum” to be filled by rivals such as China, according to Michael Ivenso, an energy transition analyst with the Nigerian delegation.
Under a memo of understanding signed at COP29, China will build a large solar farm in Nigeria funded by a grant rather than a loan, he told Scientific American. China has signed similar documents on climate cooperation with 42 other developing countries. “When a power exits, it creates an opportunity for another to enter,” Ivenso said. “If the U.S. decides that that’s what it’s going to do, and China—perhaps even Russia and some other [countries]—now gets into that space that they’ve left, then that’s their problem to deal with.”
There is also tension over new technologies. China already controls 80 percent of the world’s solar panel supply chain. Several Biden-era laws, including the Inflation Reduction Act, were intended to help U.S. companies compete in more nascent markets such as batteries, electric vehicles and hydrogen fuel. Trump, however, has said he’ll repeal such laws. Furthermore, his promised use of wide-reaching tariffs could turn the U.S. cleantech industry into what Li calls a “fat bird living on an isolated island,” safe from predation at home but unable to compete abroad.
Scrapping the Biden laws could drive $80 billion of green energy investment abroad and cost the U.S. $50 billion in lost exports, according to a Johns Hopkins University report released this month. U.S. cleantech needs “more collaboration instead of this high-fence, small-yard kind of mindset,” said Haimeng Zhang, vice president of the major Chinese solar producer LONGi, which opened a factory in Ohio with a U.S. company this year. “That's not very helpful to develop your own industry.”
Two U.S. congressional delegations to COP29 have embodied these two clashing visions. A delegation of four Republicans and one Democrat from the U.S. House of Representatives promised to “unleash American energy” with the “reliable” technologies of natural gas, hydropower, nuclear power and “clean coal.” Yet a delegation of Democratic Senators Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island and Ed Markey of Massachusetts said a U.S. failure to keep investing in green energy innovation would let China take an insurmountable lead in new technologies. Markey promised a “mighty battle” over the Inflation Reduction Act in congress, where 18 House Republicans have spoken up in favor of the law.
“If [China] has a plan, and we do not have a plan, we will lose,” he said. “We will lose markets around the planet. We will lose the cutting-edge technological breakthroughs that otherwise would have been conceptualized here in the United States."