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U.S. Demands Something for Nothing at Glasgow

The top constraint on global climate talks is still parochial American
politics.

 

A view of the SSE Hydro, located on the Scottish Event Campus in
Glasgow, Scotland, one of the host venues for the upcoming COP26 climate
summit (Ewan Bootman/NurPhoto via AP)

 

By Lee Harris

A Democratic senator from West Virginia spoiled the most ambitious
climate policy proposal of the decade over worries about costs to the
domestic energy and manufacturing sectors.

Sound familiar?

A quarter-century ago, Robert Byrd, champion of coal country and
engineer of the "Byrd Rule," a limit on the reconciliation process

that Democrats are currently wrestling with in passing the Biden agenda,
led a resolution blocking the U.S. from ratifying the Kyoto Protocol,
which set binding limits on greenhouse gas emissions from industrialized
nations. After feverish corporate lobbying
,
and citing concerns that the treaty would make Americans less
competitive with China, Byrd ensured that the U.S. would never leash
itself to curbing its emissions without developing countries doing the
same.

The Byrd resolution, authored with future Obama defense secretary Chuck
Hagel (R-NE), killed ratification of Kyoto by the world's richest and
biggest polluter, and helped doom later talks. At the Copenhagen summit
of 2009, participants again wrangled over how to divvy up a maximum
carbon budget, and developing countries chafed at being asked to cut
emissions in energy-intensive sectors. Observers saw the failure of
Copenhagen as final proof against "top-down" climate talks: Negotiating
how to distribute a top line of carbon emissions sets off a bitter
zero-sum struggle.

Instead of horse trading within a set pollution cap, the 2015 Paris
summit asked countries to make their own nonbinding commitments to
emissions reduction. Participants can opt out and then rejoin
"nationally determined contributions," which they set for themselves. By
2019, only one country in the world

(Morocco) was on track to hit its self-created Paris target. But being
more accommodating-that is, weak, vague, and voluntary-has also made
Paris more lasting.

For the first two weeks of November, diplomats will weigh progress on
those targets and announce more commitments at the U.N. COP26 climate
change conference in Glasgow, Scotland. The key axis of this summit will
again be the U.S.-China dynamic, and the parochial politics of what
representatives from fossil fuel-producing regions in each country are
willing to give up.

This time, China attends as the world's biggest polluter, pumping out
more emissions than the entire Organisation for Economic Co-operation
and Development, the member club of rich countries, combined. Since
emissions are mostly a problem of the world's upper and middle
classes, though, U.S. per-person pollution still dwarfs China's.

Countries where the public agrees on the need for immediate action
include small island states where seas are rising. In industrialized
countries, too, severe storms, heat, and flooding have arrived. But
since impacts are felt unequally, the populations already battered by
the climate emergency still have little political voice. And diplomats
mostly play to domestic audiences.

However you slice it, China and the U.S. are prime engines of global
energy consumption
and
their cooperation could have powerful knock-on effects. Currently,
though, the United States' negotiating power is at a nadir, and its
ability to cooperate with China crosscut by competing economic and human
rights priorities. And once again, a senator from West Virginia who
speaks for a shrinking but entrenched coalition of fossil fuel interests
could foil the talks.

Read all our climate coverage here

AMERICA IS POISED to blow past its Paris commitments, which it only
just rejoined. Rather than restock its political capital-and
credibility is the only tool that counts at a conference that threw out
hard enforcement mechanisms up front-Biden's negotiators will fly to
Glasgow after months of ratcheting up hawkish rhetoric toward China,
amid simmering political discontent at home.

John Kerry, now serving as special presidential envoy on climate for the
National Security Council, has held numerous talks with his Chinese
counterparts. But he has not been authorized to negotiate in good faith
with the Chinese.

Instead, he argues that he can "compartmentalize
"
the climate emergency, keeping it on a separate track from competition
with China in other spheres. The Biden administration has stressed that
it will not soft-pedal human rights criticism, geostrategic priorities,
or trade.

Ryan Hass, who was China director at the National Security Council
during the Paris Agreement and acted as a counterpart to Obama's
negotiators, said this follows existing precedent. Climate negotiators
have never been authorized to trade away any other priorities. Kerry is
responding to an "imagined anxiety," Hass said, "that American climate
negotiators will be so desperate for cooperation with China they will
mortgage other elements of the relationship."

"Oh my God, we can't possibly be trying to work with the Chinese on
climate issues, because they will hoodwink us, nickel-and-dime us into
softening our posture on other issues." That's the sentiment you'll
hear these days, Hass told the

**Prospect**, if you "spend a few minutes walking around the hallways of
the National Security Council."

To pull off the negotiations, the U.S. would have to come armed with
some climate commitments of its own, which it currently isn't in any
position to guarantee. America's unstable internal politics and high
inequality make other countries worry that any promises made at the
conference could evaporate with a Trump restoration in just a few years.

"The United States has no authority to press China harder, because it
doesn't have its own house in order," Kelly Sims Gallagher, an energy
policy scholar who was a senior adviser to the special envoy for climate
change at Obama's State Department, told the

**Prospect**.

Biden could have an argument to make if he arrives at the conference
having successfully passed his budget agenda, which contains an
unprecedented outlay
of green
spending. The new soft deadline for budget reconciliation is October 31,
one day before COP26 opens. The investments in the infrastructure and
reconciliation bills "would unlock the full potential of the economic
and climate benefits, and strengthen U.S. leadership going into COP26,"
a senior administration official tells the

**Prospect**.

But Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) has resisted significant climate measures in
the bill. The Senate Energy and Natural Resources chair opposes the $3.5
trillion compromise price tag
, has
insisted on continuing fossil fuel subsidies, and is pushing to gut the
clean-energy standard, which incentivizes power companies to stop using
fossil fuels, by adding natural gas
.

The fate of the U.S. climate bill has a global impact. The U.S. kept its
multiyear streak
as the world's top producer of oil and gas

through the pandemic. Still, future decisions by oil-producing states
and middle-income giants like India and Brazil will determine how much
global heating can still be avoided. Bathed in the comfortable glow of
American inaction, petrostates and other culprits have long escaped
criticism.

"The U.S. is a fig leaf that's made it so that no petro power has ever
derailed climate negotiation, really-because they didn't need to,"
said Daniel Aldana Cohen, a Berkeley sociologist who studies climate
politics. "If the U.S. passed a credible climate bill, that would open
the door to finding out how far Russia and Saudi Arabia would go."

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THE BIDEN ADMINISTRATION'S POSTURE on China, which shares much with
the previous administration, reflects hawkish viewpoints from both
parties. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) has said
that
increased reliance on batteries for electric vehicles "will enslave
America to China." Thomas Wright of the Brookings Institution has made
the same argument more admissible in polite company
.

Kerry is irresponsibly single-minded about climate, Wright argues, and
has gone rogue before: In linking Egypt policy to the Middle East peace
process as secretary of state, Kerry acted unilaterally in ways that
"contradicted the Obama administration's position on the importance of
democracy and human rights."

Although the administration nominally recognizes climate-related
security risks
,
Georgetown Ph.D.s like Wright still see the environment as basically the
domain of effete tree huggers, not a centerpiece of a grand strategy.

Given that criticism, Kerry has stressed cordoning off climate talks. On
a recent press call, the envoy told reporters that Chinese officials
have raised political concerns in their preliminary talks.

"My response," Kerry said, "was, 'Hey look, climate is not
ideological. It's not partisan, it's not a geostrategic weapon or
tool, and it's certainly not day-to-day politics. It's a global, not
bilateral, challenge.'"

That is not just naïve political cant-it's inaccurate. Energy
security is a first-order geostrategic concern. This is evident in how
China has accelerated its pursuit of energy security.

Communist Party leaders are acutely aware of the "Malacca Dilemma,"
China's heavy reliance on oil and natural gas shipments that flow
through choke points like the high-traffic Malacca Strait. Fears of a
U.S. blockade, and anxieties about isolation, have prompted China to
speed its development of pipeline infrastructure
and
land-based routes for oil. And while Chinese President Xi Jinping
announced an end to Chinese financing for coal plants abroad in a speech
at the U.N. last month, he has retained the fuel as a major share of the
country's power mix.

Part of this involves China contending with its own regional
carbon-emitting cadres
.
But if American belligerence is keeping China's share of coal use
high, a good analogy is mutually assured destruction
, the
defensive stockpiling of fatal weapons. In the short term, the energy
strategy mirrors America's all-of-the-above

approach: China is the world's top producer of renewables and also its
leading consumer of coal.

At China's scale, it is a suicidal growth path, explaining why
decarbonization is not only an ideological power move, but a matter of
self-interest.

That does not make Chinese decarbonization inevitable without
international pressure. The military historian Adam Tooze has argued for
a "green detente
"
with China, in which the U.S. could begin by collaborating with China on
a greener Belt and Road Initiative. Lu Xiang, an expert on Sino-U.S.
relations at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, has said the U.S.
should be more willing to cooperate on trade of green technology. He
cited

U.S. restrictions on solar products from Xinjiang, which have been
linked to forced labor.

The American posture has instead doubled down on critiquing Chinese
human rights abuses. And it is attempting to outcompete Belt and Road
through development banks like the newly minted U.S. International
Development Finance Corporation and the vague "Build Back Better World"
initiative.

[link removed]

Some hope Biden will extend the language of economic competition with
China to climate, setting off a green race to the top. Absent domestic
spending-not only direct green investment, but also social programs to
avert more carbon retrenchment under right-wing leadership-that race
could look pretty lopsided, with Chinese commitments far outpacing
American ones. The lack of a climate portfolio in the reconciliation
bill will make this even worse.

Meanwhile, realists in Washington doubt it will be possible to make
progress on bracketed environmental goals. Chinese diplomats have argued
that the U.S. can't become increasingly confrontational with China
with one hand while demanding climate compliance with the other.

"The U.S. side hopes that climate cooperation can be an 'oasis' in
China-U.S. relations, but if that 'oasis' is surrounded by desert,
it will also become desertified sooner or later," Foreign Minister Wang
Yi said last month .

Few are willing to argue that, for example, Xinjiang should be
de-emphasized. Pressed on what bargaining chips, specifically, the U.S.
should be prepared to put on the table, critics of Cold War rhetoric can
be diffident.

"I do really think that U.S. leadership can matter and can inspire other
people to follow. And the fact that the U.S. was able to do it [at
Paris] standing shoulder to shoulder with China was pretty inspirational
to a lot of developing countries," Sims Gallagher said.

The outcome this month in Congress isn't Biden's exclusive
opportunity to demonstrate seriousness. Executive actions to reduce
tailpipe emissions and phase out "super-pollutants" like
hydrofluorocarbons will have an impact, the senior administration
official stated. But those could be reversed under a future right-wing
administration, which is more likely if Biden fails to spend now. Like
it or not, then, spats in the U.S. Senate are once again the key
constraint on global climate action. And with the climate envoy's
negotiating resources neutered, the U.S. is poised to go into Glasgow
demanding something for nothing.

Lee Harris is a writing fellow at The American Prospect.

 

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