Where U.S.-China Competition Leaves Climate Change
The latest round of international negotiations on climate change, which concluded on Sunday, achieved a significant breakthrough by creating a fund to compensate poor countries for damage caused by global warming. But the two weeks of intense haggling at COP27, this year’s United Nations climate summit in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, may focus the attention of the climate-activist community on the United States and China more than ever. The summit left unresolved some of the thorniest issues, including how exactly the new fund will work, and many experts believe that the progress necessary to repair a warming world will be extremely difficult, and perhaps impossible, without close collaboration between these two great powers.
Lately, that cooperation has fallen victim to souring U.S.-China relations. Beijing suspended bilateral dialogue with Washington on climate in August, and talks were not resumed until midway through COP27 in a meeting between Presidents Joe Biden and Xi Jinping on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Bali last week.
Some fears may now be soothed. But the episode confirms the precariousness of the U.S.-China relationship—and, even more, the dangers of relying on continued goodwill between the two in 2014 paved the way for the historic Paris Agreement a year later. Without renewed impetus, some experts worry, the UN-backed process could drift and founder.
