Were you as alarmed as I was by the fact that much of Siberia, north of the Arctic Circle, just had a six month heat wave?  It was capped by a record high temperature over 100°F, and accompanied by record wildfires.  According to a recent Washington Post article, a team of “climate researchers from multiple institutions in France, Germany, the Netherlands, Russia, Switzerland and the United Kingdom [concluded this] would have been virtually impossible without human-induced global warming.”

If current trends continue, the Earth’s average temperature will increase somewhere between 2.5 and 10 degrees Fahrenheit over the next century.  Which, I guess, should not be surprising since “97 percent or more of actively publishing climate scientists agree [that] climate-warming trends over the past century are extremely likely due to human activities.”   

Unless we change our greenhouse gas emitting ways, our children and grandchildren will continue to see ever more damaging effects from climate change, including stronger and more intense hurricanes, more droughts and heat waves, more frequent wildfires, and sea levels rising 1-8 feet by the year 2100, threatening hundreds of millions of people who live in coastal areas.

So what is China doing about it?  More than you might think, and not nearly enough.

“Since coming to power in 2013, President Xi Jinping has been calling on his countrymen to ‘build an ecological civilization’…  [and] the Chinese government has pledged more than $1 trillion dollars in air, water, and soil cleanup plans… [In the seven years since], Beijing has invested billions of dollars in green energy, including wind and solar, and is one of the largest markets for wind turbines, solar panels and electric vehicles. It also exports two-thirds of the world’s installed solar cells.” 

The best way to evaluate China’s impact is to compare their results to the goals for international progress which were negotiated by representatives of 196 countries at the meeting that led to the signing of the Paris Agreement. The goals of this treaty included “holding warming well below 3.6°F (2°C), and pursuing efforts to limit warming to 2.7°F (1.5°C)” over pre-industrial levels.

To date, 189 parties have signed the Paris Agreement including every country on the planet large enough to have an impact, except Iran and Turkey.  Oh yeah, you can put an asterisk next to the United States, since we did sign, but announced in 2017 that we plan to withdraw.  Advance notice is required under the terms of the agreement, so technically the US cannot withdraw until November 4, 2020, which ironically is one day after the next US Presidential election.

The Climate Action Tracker measures and evaluates “climate change mitigation commitments” to date by 32 countries which are responsible for about 80% of the planet’s emissions. Based on commitments to date, each country is categorized into one of six groups.  The group that has actually made the necessary commitments to meet Paris Agreement goals is called “role model” group. Unfortunately, this is a bit theoretical, since not a single one of these 32 countries can be classified as a role model. 

China’s results were most recently classified in the group that ranks 5^th out of 6 with a “highly insufficient” response,  (The US results were even worse.  We were classified in the lowest category in this report:  “critically insufficient.”)    

China’s activities have been contradictory.  It is “both the greenest [country] in the world, [and] also the most polluting. It has more wind and solar power than anybody else, yet it is also the world’s biggest builder of new coal plants.”  

The most effective of Beijing’s green initiatives can be seen in its approach to solar power. China encouraged the development of this infant industry even before Xi Jinping made his first “ecological civilization” speech by offering a variety of financial incentives to develop solar power, including loan discounts and an above-market price for electricity delivered to the grid. They also succeeded in attracting investment from other countries, including California venture capital. 

The result was that “by the 2010s, China had a huge domestic market for solar panels and dominated the world market. It also brought the price of panels down far enough to stimulate the growth of solar energy markets around the world… [Then] with business booming, China began to reduce its subsidies to the solar industry in 2014.”

The industry has continued to grow.  As of 2018, “China [had] more solar energy capacity than any other country in the world, at a gargantuan 130 gigawatts [billion watts]. If it were all generating electricity at once, it could power the whole of the UK several times over.”

According to a study published last year, “344 Chinese cities… have solar systems producing energy at lower prices than the grid, without any subsidies.”  Experts say that “China is also driving down solar prices around the world thanks to the scale of production and learning curve effects.”   To put it another way, “in effect, China seeded the global green energy industry by lowering initial costs and creating artificial demand.”

As other countries turn to solar power, Chinese companies have also gained a huge competitive advantage in getting contracts to help build their solar farms, including the world’s largest, the Noor Complex Solar Power Plant in Morocco.  The first stages went online in 2016, and it will be fully completed in the near future.  When finished, it will “be the size of 3,500 football fields [and] produce enough electricity to power a city the size of Prague, or twice the size of Marrakesh.”

As a result of this type of progress, China is “in a very influential position as the world’s renewable energy superpower,” according to a report by the Global Commission on the Geopolitics of Energy Transformation and the International Renewable Energy Agency. 

So what does all this mean for US-China relations?  Well, you don’t have to be a regular reader of this blog to know that Americans have become increasingly aware of China’s opposition to US interests in many different areas.  But if there is one single goal that China and the US should be able to agree on, it is reducing the effects of global warming.  After all, we share the same planet, and if rising seas continue to threaten New York, they will also threaten Shanghai.

And since “China is simultaneously the world’s largest consumer of coal and the largest developer of renewable energy… the choice it makes, domestically and abroad, between the technology of the past versus the renewable future will have a lasting effect on the world’s ability to limit warming to 2.7˚F.”

This impact was underlined at a UN Climate Change conference in Madrid last year.  As the Washington Post summed it up:  “For all the good intentions of the governments gathered in Madrid, a humbling reality hangs over the latest climate change conference. The effectiveness of what is agreed and done will ultimately stand or fall on the actions of just one country: China.”