US President Donald Trump’s decision to isolate the US on climate change triggered waves of complaints from government and business leaders around the world and handed China a golden opportunity to burnish its image as a global leader.
Trump’s withdrawal from the almost 200-nation Paris Agreement on climate, which aligned the US with Syria and Nicaragua as the only holdouts, risks undermining the commitment of other nations to limit fossil-fuel pollution.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel told Trump at a summit last month that the retreat would signal an unfortunate US willingness to allow less benign powers, like China, to step up on the international stage.
For Germans, “the worrisome part is that Trump basically says I’m not interested in being a global leader anymore,” said Jan Techau, head of the Richard Holbrooke Forum at the American Academy in Berlin. “It spooks them a great deal. They understand that the US is the security guarantor, that it sets global standards. You sense that with the political elite, but also with ordinary folks.”
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) has sought to capitalize on the public-relations opportunities afforded by Trump’s “America First” doctrine — helping mask the nation’s habit of flouting the international order when the rules don not suit its goals.
China’s leader used the Davos forum of global elites in January to boost his nation as a bastion of free trade. An EU-China summit in Brussels provided a platform for their first-ever joint statement on climate and clean energy.
“This situation should do a lot to ease the pressure on China to ‘behave well’ as a rising power,” Lingnan University in Hong Kong Center for Asian Pacific Studies director Zhang Baohui (張泊匯), said by e-mail. “Now, it is the US that looks like a revisionist power. China, on the other hand, due to its increasing efforts to play a leadership role in world affairs, will be now viewed positively, especially among the Europeans.”
With his announcement in Washington on Thursday, Trump began a process that will take years to unfold — creating an opening for him to reverse course and injecting it as an issue in the next presidential election.
Under the terms of the deal, the earliest the US can formally extricate itself from the accord is Nov. 4, 2020 — the day after the next presidential election. He would have wide latitude to change his mind up until that point.
Trump said the accord undermined US interests, sent taxpayer money abroad and did not require enough from other nations, singling out China and India.
“I was elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh — not Paris,” he said.
The mayor of Pittsburgh subsequently tweeted his criticism of the move.
State and local leaders in the US also broke with Trump. California Governor Jerry Brown on Friday headed to China to urge the world’s most populous nation to take its cues from Sacramento and not the US capital.
The US-European trans-Atlantic bond is already under pressure after Trump’s visit to European capitals last month. In the aftermath of his blustery diplomacy on trade and security, Merkel said that ties that have underpinned German foreign policy since World War II are “to some extent” less dependable.
Meanwhile, Walt Disney Co chief executive officer Bob Iger and Tesla founder Elon Musk both withdrew from a presidential jobs panel, and such blue-chip US titans as General Electric Co, Ford Motor Co, Dow Chemical Co and Microsoft Corp were among companies expressing dismay.
Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein took to Twitter for the first time to voice concern. The chorus even included oil-industry executives.
Before Trump even made his decision public, oil explorers Exxon Mobil Corp, ConocoPhillips and BP PLC reiterated their support for the global agreement. Their argument: The US is better off with a seat at the table so it can influence global efforts to curb emissions that are largely produced by the fossil fuels they profit from.
“Energy needs are a function of population and living standards,” Exxon CEO Darren Woods said this week during his first annual meeting since becoming CEO on Jan. 1. “When it comes to policy, the goal should be to reduce emissions at the lowest cost to society.”
Trump, who has called climate change a “hoax,” campaigned on the pledge to exit the pact signed in 2015.
White House legal advisers had warned that staying in the accord could undercut Trump’s efforts to rescind rules on power-plant emissions and fuel efficiency.
The agreement allows nations to adjust their individual emissions targets, with a goal of strengthening them over time, but there is no established mechanism that would prompt nations to renegotiate the entire accord.
Negotiators built flexibility into the deal from the start, structuring the agreement so that individual nations could determine their own commitments — without any punishment for failing to fulfill them.
“Apparently the White House has no idea how a treaty works,” Christiana Figueres, the former executive-secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, told reporters on a conference call. She described Trump’s announcement as a “vacuous political melodrama.”
The US leader’s “Make America Great Again” rhetoric has done little to counter Xi’s message that it is China, not the US, that leads the world when it comes to vision on everything from the global economic order to saving the world.
His major diplomatic project targets rebuilding ancient trading routes from China to Europe overland and by sea, which he calls the “Belt and Road Initiative.”
“This is an open goal for China to step up and be the most responsible global leader on the planet, and do so in a way that is not threatening to anyone,” said Nick Bisley, a professor of international relations at La Trobe University in Melbourne. “You can bet your bottom dollar that China is going to present itself as a pioneering leader.”
China has already established itself as a climate-change leader when it comes to its world-class environmental problem, an issue considered politically existential by the Chinese Communist Party.
The pollution that now chokes the nation’s rivers and air — forcing its population to regularly don filter masks and keep their children home from school — is a result of breakneck economic growth promoted for decades by Beijing.
China has been the world’s biggest clean-energy investor since 2012. Last year, it spent US$88 billion on clean sources of energy such as wind and solar power, accounting for about one-third of renewables investment globally.
According to data compiled by Bloomberg New Energy Finance, China invested US$17.9 billion in clean energy projects in the first quarter, compared with US$4.1 billion in Japan and US$9.4 billion in the US.
The praise China is winning with its “guardian-of-the-rules-based-order” messaging contrasts with its behavior in other domains.
Beijing last year earned widespread condemnation when it ignored an international tribunal ruling — made under a global convention to which China is a signatory — that its claims to almost all of the South China Sea have no legal standing and in Hong Kong, its persistent encroachments on the city’s autonomy prompt regular outcries that it has breached a treaty signed with the UK.
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