A projection of what Shanghai, China, will look like in a world that is 4 degrees warmer (c. 2100). (Photo: Climate Central)
Since President Trump pulled out of the Paris climate accord, there has been speculation that China could take the lead in the fight against climate change. China’s leader Xi Jinping has certainly been eager to assume this role, just as he took up the cause of free trade against Trump’s nationalist posturing.
At first glance, this might seem improbable. After all, China is by far the leading emitter of CO2, pumping out more emissions per year than the US, the EU and Japan combined. Moreover, China wastes stupendous amounts of energy in its inefficient industries: According to the US Energy Information Administration, China’s industries consume 7.9 times as much energy per US dollar of GDP as Japan, 5.8 times as much as the UK and 3.9 times as much as the US. As energy analyst Robert Wilson writes: “China has now passed America and is now the most physically important country on the planet. No other country has a more important influence on the biosphere, whether in terms of what we take from it or what we dump into it.”
Yet, while China is the world’s leading polluter by far, it is also the world’s leading producer of both wind turbines and solar panels. China also leads the world in installed capacity of both wind and solar. So Xi Jinping’s ambition is perhaps not entirely implausible.
Besides, the US has hardly been a leader in the fight against climate change. While President Obama made some modest efforts to improve vehicle fleet mileage and suppress coal emissions, these gains were rapidly outstripped by his parallel efforts to promote fracking, build “enough pipelines to encircle the Earth and then some,” expand deep ocean drilling, open the Arctic and US Eastern seaboard to drilling, and more. In fact, US fossil fuel output grew by some 40 percent on Obama’s watch, turning “Saudi America” into an oil exporter for the first time in decades….