March 18, 2025, By The Editorial Board
Excerpt: With the US out of the Paris accords (again), the world’s biggest polluter should show it’s serious about slashing emissions.
Now that the US has withdrawn — again — from the Paris accords, China will surely be tempted to shrink its own climate ambitions. In fact, this is the moment to expand them.
Last month, signatories to the 2015 Paris Agreement were meant to submit updated climate action plans, known as nationally determined contributions. Along with most others, China missed the deadline. (The US goals submitted last year by President Joe Biden’s administration will presumably be ignored by his successor.) Traditionally, Chinese officials have preferred to set modest targets they can be sure to meet, if not exceed. Most observers expect any new NDCs to follow precedent.
China’s approach has produced results. The world’s biggest emitter has undertaken a significant expansion of renewable energy — reaching its goal of adding 1,200 gigawatts from wind and solar six years early, and slating 150 new nuclear reactors for construction between 2020 and 2035. It may well triple renewables capacity and put 100 million electric vehicles on the road by 2030. The country’s carbon emissions could peak as soon as this year, also well ahead of schedule.
In the battle to limit global warming to 1.5C, however, what matters isn’t so much when China’s emissions peak but the level they reach and how quickly they fall thereafter. A slow, gradual decline would continue to fill the atmosphere with greenhouse gases and push up global temperatures. If the world is to prevent the worst effects of climate change, much sharper cuts will be needed.
Simply building out more renewable capacity isn’t likely to achieve them. Even as China invested $940 billion in clean-energy sectors last year, it launched or resumed construction on almost 100 gigawatts of coal-power projects, the most since 2015. Coal consumption continues to rise at the expense of wind and solar, and energy officials expect fossil fuels to account for 30% of energy demand growth through 2030.
China has both the scope and incentive to be more ambitious.
…
Meanwhile, the new US antipathy toward climate efforts has offered China a rare opportunity to expand its global influence. Several developing nations, disproportionately exposed to the effects of global warming, are growing uneasy about the scale of Chinese emissions, which have now topped Europe’s historically. Showing greater boldness at home and increasing investment in green projects overseas would deflect critics and support the otherwise dubious narrative that China is a more reliable and selfless partner than the US.
If Chinese leaders want to prove they’re serious about meeting their climate obligations — admittedly, a big if — they would set a hard cap on overall greenhouse-gas emissions and a goal of reducing them by at least 30% from 2023 levels by 2035. They should keep adding clean-energy capacity at the current rapid pace while halting approvals of new coal plants and instituting strict targets to reduce coal consumption and the curtailment of wind and solar resources. Ambitious sectoral goals — to increase electric steelmaking, for instance, or the uptake of electric vehicles — would help maintain momentum behind decarbonization.
President Xi Jinping likes to say his nation is helping drive “changes unseen in a century.” Here’s his chance to prove that China can produce the kind of change the world actually wants to see.
