China Is Now the World’s Climate Champion

There is positive buzz around the COP30 climate talks in Belem, Brazil, but it has nothing to do with the summit itself. The conferences began in 1992, and at this summit world leaders laid the groundwork for the first international treaty to combat climate change. But these days, UN-led summits crowded The fossil fuel lobby and many major industrialized countries simply ignore it. The US is boycotting this year, and whatever is achieved as a result is not expected to significantly curb global emissions.

Rather, the source of relief in Belem was the cumulative recognition set out in a widely circulated document. Amber's reportglobal energy think tank – that China is ahead of the United States and the European Union in its clean energy technologies and industries. China is introducing more twice as much renewable energy sources (solar and wind), like the rest of the world combined. As a result, China's carbon dioxide emissions remained stagnant last year. this year they must fall – bye those all over the world rose to record heights.

China's success is not due to international summits or moralistic bullying, but to fierce self-interest. Clean solar and wind power is the cheapest energy in the world, and mass-produced clean technologies are available everywhere.

“China recognizes that the whole system needs to be reconfigured,” Mui Yang, an analyst at Ember, a global energy think tank, told me. “China has abandoned a development model based on fossil fuels, although its economy, like many other countries in the world now, is full of problems. But it sees a new type of development based on environmental sustainability.”

Over the past decade, China has reduced emissions at home and abroad by exporting clean energy technologies. empowering others countries to implement cleaner energy solutions faster, reports Center for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CRECA), a think tank headquartered in Helsinki. China's current renewable energy performance is ahead of many of its own targets and will leave behind the EU, which has long been a global leader on climate protection. Its secret lies in the same incentives and policies that Germany and other Europeans put in place in the 2000s, when they led the world in innovation and growth in renewable energy.

“China is the reason the battle against global warming looks more winning than ever before,” says Jonas Waak of daily newspaperGerman daily newspaper. “China is now at the center of global decarbonization, not because more governments want to protect the climate, but rather because there is no safer path to prosperity.”

China solar production has grown 14-fold in a decade and now dominates the global market. It sets wind-solar equivalent to five large nuclear power plants per week. In 2024, China added four times more solar generation to its supply than the EU and six times more wind power. China passed its own 2030 targets six years early by setting a giant 1200 GW wind and solar power capacity in 2024, and will also exceed other expectations, for example in the area of ​​sustainable forest management. By 2030, non-fossil fuels will account for 25 percent of energy consumption: a league above the US, which is moving in the opposite direction, but still behind the EU, which has already surpassed 25 percent.

China remains dependent on fossil fuels – it leads the world in coal consumption— but demand for gasoline, diesel and jet fuel leveled off last year. China's dependence on these fuels was actually 2.5 percent below 2021 levels, the agency said. International Energy Agency. The IEA attributes this phenomenon to “structural shifts” such as electrification: China's electrification rate, at about 30 percent of final energy consumption, is significantly higher than that of the United States and the European Union. Today, about half of China's car sales are electric vehicles, the result of domestic policies ranging from incentives to trade-in deals.

Moreover, and just as importantly, China's clean technologies are capturing the market that Europe hoped to rule. China owns 86 percent global module production and controls virtually the entire supply chain of some key components.

In the electric vehicle market it is only slightly less dominant: it controls three quarters sector, surpassing Tesla in 2023. Thanks to its richness in rare earth metals, an important component of batteries, it is also ahead of the curve in low-emission hydrogen production technology. Moreover, China is investing heavily in clean energy projects in more than 50 countriesproviding an energy transition for the rest of the world.

China's achievements are particularly good news because China is the world's largest emitter of carbon dioxide – and, in the long term: the country is responsible for 90 percent CO growth₂ emissions since 2015. Today its share in total emissions is 32 percentfar ahead of the US (13 percent), India (8 percent) and the EU (6 percent).

According to CRECA's Belinda Schepe, China's investment in a renewable energy future has more than one motive. Yes, financials are important, she admits: ten percent of China's GDP comes from the cleantech sector, and that figure could soon double. But energy security plays a role. China is still great fossil fuel importerincluding crude oil, coal and natural gas. Russia is one of the largest oil suppliers. But Schepe argues that environmental calculations are not just window dressing: Heat waves and floods are plaguing China and its urban centers are drowning in air pollution.

China, although ahead, could act more like the “champion of international climate change cooperation” it recently boasted. It continues to invest heavily in coal. His oil demand for petrochemicals (not for combustion purposes) are also growing. Its emissions are more than twice those of the United States. He has not abandoned the growth-oriented economic model. And the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases' 2035 targets are laughably conservative, cutting emissions by just 7 to 10 percent of peak emissions, while meeting the Paris targets requires a 30 percent reduction. For example, Beijing's goal of achieving net-zero emissions by 2060 is unambitious and uninspiring (Germany's goal is by 2045), and falls far short of what is needed to avert climate catastrophe.

However, it has a responsibility to maintain the global momentum that exists at a time when climate protection is lagging behind. China's achievements and forward-looking thinking are humbling Europe and North America. The many benefits of the clean energy transition have been documented for over a decade, with their benefits outlined and tested by experts around the world. To his credit, President Joe Biden understood this and acted on it, putting the United States at the forefront of climate action around the world. Most top-level European politicians also know this, but they have been outmaneuvered by the fossil fuel and nuclear industry and right-wing populists. This is a damning indictment of people like Angela Merkel and Friedrich Merz in Germany, who know that a radical energy transition is necessary and beneficial but are too timid to say it out loud. In the European Parliament, German Christian Democrats are joining forces with far-right factions to scrap Europe's Green Deal – in the name of the free market.

China is in many ways not a country worthy of emulation. But it has apparently taken into account the extensive research and experience now available and has concluded that it has more to gain than to lose by transforming its economy. Europe and the United States have lost their leadership in changing global energy supplies. This bodes bad news for the future of liberal democracy.