Dr. Genevieve Guenther is the founding director of End Climate Silence and affiliate faculty at The New School, where she sits on the board of the Tishman Environment and Design Center. Her book, “The Language of Climate Politics,” was published in 2024 by Oxford University Press.
In the months since taking office, President Trump has effectively bulldozed U.S. climate governance. He has once again withdrawn the United States from the Paris Agreement, suppressed electric-vehicle innovation by rescinding carbon dioxide emission standards for cars, and declared a “national energy emergency” to suspend environmental rules around fossil energy extraction.
Trump has also lifted the pause on permitting new liquified natural gas export terminals, whose projected climate pollution could cancel out an estimated third of domestic emissions reductions even if Biden’s climate policies were continued, and he is suppressing climate research — scrubbing the words “climate crisis” and “climate science” from government documents — across federal agencies and departments. U.S. scientists are now barred by this administration from working on the next climate report of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Most recently, Trump signed a series of executive orders to boost coal, the most climate-harming fossil fuel. He directed Interior Secretary Doug Burgum to end a pause on coal leasing on federal lands, exempted coal-fired power plants from federal requirements to reduce emissions of toxic pollutants such as mercury, arsenic and benzene, and officially promoted coal exports. Finally, in what may be called “executive overreach,” Trump ordered Attorney General Pam Bondi to take “all appropriate action to stop the enforcement” of state laws aimed at curbing greenhouse gas emissions or holding the fossil energy industry liable for climate-change damages.
It appears that this throughgoing climate denial is not just payback for the nearly $450 million that the oil and gas industry spent, according to liberal advocacy group Climate Power, on behalf of Trump and the Republicans. It seems to lie at the center of the neo-authoritarian agenda advanced by the Trumpian coalition of big tech, fossil-energy interests and MAGA populists. “Project 2025,” the right-wing playbook for the first 180 days of a Republican presidency, proposes, for example, to defund and dismantle the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration because it is, as they call it, a key source of “the climate change alarm industry.”
Trump’s coalition sees revenue in the rapid development of AI systems reliant on expanded fossil-energy infrastructure. They are, it seems, in the process of creating markets for both AI and fossil fuels, with Big Tech forcibly integrating AI into its products, even though the majority of consumers have negative feelings about the technology, while the Trump regime uses executive action to suppress the nascent domestic clean-energy industry and state power to coerce foreign aid recipients into buying American methane gas.
Whether or not this fossil-fueled AI boom is a program to “make America great again” is an open question. One thing is clear, however: In this element of his platform, as in his tariff policy, Trump is deeply motivated by his desire to outcompete China. The U.S. was caught off guard when Chinese researchers released the AI platform DeepSeek, which produces results equivalent to U.S. large-language models with greater efficiency and at lower cost. But what is essential to understand is that the U.S. will be equally unprepared on the energy front. For although China is continuing to build out coal-fired power plants, it has also established what it calls the “dual-carbon goals” of peaking carbon dioxide emissions by 2030 and drawing them down to net zero by 2060. Meanwhile, the U.S. impossibly attempts to return to a world without climate change.
This divergence could well lead to America’s or, indeed, democratic capitalism’s hegemonic decline. Climate change may have fallen off the American agenda in the wake of Trump’s victory, but it remains very real. Last year was the first time the planet’s temperature exceeded 1.5 degrees Celsius over preindustrial temperatures. Once temperatures exceed 1.5 degrees Celsius, the likelihood of widespread and irreversible catastrophic harm to human systems increases enormously. In January, the United Kingdom’s Institute and Faculty of Actuaries and Exeter University estimated that a worst-case scenario of the world’s current emissions trajectory — a 3 degrees Celsius increase by 2080 or 2100 — could contract the global economy by up to 50% somewhere between 2070 and 2090.
“Climate change may have fallen off the American agenda in the wake of Trump’s victory, but it remains very real.”
If the world fails to phase out fossil fuels and zero out its emissions, and if the global economy begins to fall into permanent depression, both public and private stakeholders will likely call for adaptation and solar geoengineering, no matter how costly or risky, but they will also begin to seek permanent climate solutions. China is positioning itself to provide those solutions. It already dominates in climate technologies and materials, enjoying a nearly 90% global market share for solar panels, for example. And China has already enacted the most ambitious and comprehensive climate policy in the world. Called the “1+N” framework, China’s climate policy is an all-of-government, all-of-society blueprint for the country’s decarbonization. Its foundational documents — the “1” document and the first “N” document (the first of a series of directives for the practical applications of the laws in the “1” document) — were released in 2021. As this framework is built out over the coming decades, China will be increasingly poised to use its economic might and willingness to flout historical global trade norms to establish a bloc of nations capable of pressuring Saudi Arabia, Russia and the U.S. to decarbonize.
This maneuver, successfully executed, would establish China as the norm-setter for international governance and afford it the largest stake in a global net-zero-emissions economy. America, having abandoned its commitment to climate innovation and clean-energy manufacturing, and its leadership on the world stage, could be subordinated under this new regime. Perhaps more to the point, whatever the strength of American democracy in the coming decades, the rise of China would be a tragedy for human freedom. An authoritarian surveillance state that restricts its citizens’ speech, assembly and movement, tightly controls the media and the flow of information into and through the country and uses forced labor in manufacturing and industry: China is not a hegemon anyone should desire. Halting global heating with China’s vision and state capacity would truly be a Faustian bargain — yet one that might prove necessary thanks to the climate denial sanctioning the fossil-energy policies of the Trump regime.
Build Before Breaking
It is widely acknowledged that China already dominates global markets for what it calls “new energy” goods and materials — solar panels, strategic minerals, electric vehicles and so on. It is less well-known that China has also been deploying these climate technologies at home with lightning speed. China built so much solar and wind last year that it hit its 2030 target for solar deployment six years early, driving the installed capacity of renewable energy in China’s total power grid to 56%, according to China’s National Energy Administration. The Global Energy Monitor, a San Francisco-based nonprofit that analyzes energy infrastructure data, has said that China had nearly twice as much clean-energy capacity under development in 2024 as the rest of the world combined.
Right now, this “new-energy” deployment is an element of China’s “all of the above” energy strategy — what China calls its “build before breaking” strategy — in which China continues to develop coal resources while scaling the clean energy that will ultimately replace it after 2030, when, under the dual-carbon goals, rising CO2 emissions will stabilize and decline. To prepare for the “breaking” of fossil energy, the 1+N policy declares that China “will carry out initiatives to substitute renewable energy for fossil fuels, vigorously develop wind, solar, biomass, marine and geothermal energy sources among others, and continuously increase the share of non-fossil energy in total energy consumption . . . prioritizing local development and use of wind and solar power.” To incentivize fossil-fuel phaseout, the 1+N law directs China to implement “sound pricing mechanisms” — or preferential tax policies and top-down competitive price setting — to promote “the large-scale development of renewable energy.” Beyond market interventions, China’s climate policy promises a full regulatory overhaul, announcing that China will remove any existing laws and regulations “incompatible with the task of carbon dioxide peaking and carbon neutrality.”
This focus on technological substitution and systematic transformation in the energy sector extends to the entire Chinese economy. Over dozens of subsections, the 1+N directives lay out how China will decarbonize its industry, transportation, agriculture and built environment, giving “primacy” to “ecological civilization” in its further development. The policy of “comprehensive green transformation” even seeps into society and culture, where local authorities are required to “advocate simple, moderate, green, and low-carbon living patterns,” and Chinese universities are “encourag[ed]” to establish “disciplines and majors” relevant to the dual carbon goals. Yet this green transformation is not anti-modern but intertwined with a commitment to next-generation innovations. For instance, the 1+N policy institutes an “open competition mechanism” — supervised by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) — to find the best candidates to lead research on low-carbon, zero-carbon and carbon-negative technologies, including controlled nuclear fusion.
“China’s climate policy is an all-of-government, all-of-society blueprint for the country’s decarbonization.”
Perhaps most crucially in Chinese politics, the 1+N regulations integrate climate and ecological goals into the ideology of the CCP. “Carbon dioxide peaking and carbon neutrality will be an important part of the officials[’] education and training system,” the documents proclaim, so that “officials at all levels” can “effectively promote green and low carbon development.” This integration comes with accountability: local authorities and relevant departments will be required to submit annual “implementation reports” to the CCP Central Committee and the State Council. And those reports will have data. China will “establish a system to control the total volume of CO2 emissions,” building “statistical and accounting capacity for CO2 emissions … through the use of information technology.” With this data, functionaries who meet legislated climate targets will be “duly rewarded.” Those who fail to accomplish the party’s goals, by contrast, will be “criticized by means of circular, called in for talks and held accountable in accordance with laws and regulations” enforced by “all local authorities.” This enfolding of policy into party advancement is how the CCP turns its words into action.
Performance-based Legitimacy
Of course, even with accountability mechanisms, it may well be the case that these policies will be fudged in the doing. Any complicated legislation is subject to the fog of enactment, and this fog is all the thicker in China. Even with the centralizing of power under the aegis of the CCP, China’s provincial and territorial governments are part of a complex hierarchy of supervision and subordination, with regional administrations both controlling their own budgets and running key state-owned enterprises, many of which are in high-carbon industries like cement. Collusion between officials and polluters, interagency rivalries and the CCP’s lack of public transparency may well work against China’s climate agenda.
And Chinese policy language allows for this fragmentation and factionalism. Yuen Yuen Ang, a political economist and China expert at Johns Hopkins University, has proposed that there are three kinds of national policy directives in China: “grey,” which is flexible or “ambiguous about what can or cannot be done;” “black,” which clearly states what will be done; and “red,” which clearly states what must not be done. “Together,” she says, “this mixture of ambiguous and clear directives forms a system of adaptive policy communication.” In other words, the flexibility of Chinese policy language allows different provincial and urban governments in China’s hierarchy to adapt the CCP’s directives to suit their particular needs, while giving plausible deniability to the central government when it fails to impose its goals on governmental subordinates.
Yet that kind of flexibility does not characterize the language of Chinese climate politics, which, throughout the 1+ N documents, speaks in starkly unequivocal terms, with statements like China “will” do X or “will have done” Y by a certain date. This kind of explicit goal setting has unique import in China, where (at least over the past decades) the CCP has derived at least some legitimacy not just from suppressing dissent, but also from its performance — its state capacity to do what it says it is going to do. This performance-based legitimacy is different from procedural legitimacy in the United States, where elected officials may fail to secure their policy priorities, or even decline to attempt to enact their “campaign promises” (which voters generally understand to be advertisements rather than commitments), yet still the system itself remains legitimate because it manifests the people’s consent to the democratic process. China does not have this democratic participation, just the supposed hyper-competence of its benevolent authorities.
Hence the propaganda of Chinese state media constantly emphasizes the efficacy of the CCP. In a 2021 commentary about China’s climate plans, Zheng Zeguang, the Chinese ambassador to the United Kingdom, reiterated the party line: “Anyone familiar with China’s political system knows that once decisions and goals are set by the CPC [Communist Party of China] central committee and the top leader, they are incorporated into the overall national development program, turned into feasible action plans and delivered faithfully by local governments and competent departments. That is how the country has achieved its development miracle over the seventy-two years since the founding of the People’s Republic.”
Obviously, Chinese President Xi Jinping and the CCP can control public perceptions to some extent simply by virtue of their control over not only state media but also social media. It is relatively easy for them to cover up their policy failures. Yet Alex Wang, a China scholar and law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, suggested in the journal Environmental Law, that hiding environmental policy failures is difficult for the CCP when the effects of their failures are visible. Wang points to air pollution in Chinese cities as the kind of environmental problem that the CCP has been forced to address. After air pollution became a leading source of protests in both rural areas and cities, China lowered the amount of harmful particulates in its air by as much as 40%, reducing in seven years smog by nearly as much as the United States did in around three decades, according to the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago. So far, as Wang noted in his research, climate change has been only ambiguously visible, but it will become ever more present as the planet heats up.
“The 1+N regulations integrate climate and ecological goals into the ideology of the CCP [Chinese Communist Party].”
Further, China’s vulnerability to climate change is a serious concern for the Chinese public. A 2019-2020 European Investment Bank survey found that 73% of Chinese respondents consider climate change a major threat to their society, and 98% believe climate change is already impacting their daily lives. Similarly, the Yale Program on Climate Communication has reported in surveys that 94% of Chinese respondents feel that climate change is important to them personally. The Yale researchers have also reported that 97% of Chinese respondents support China’s dual carbon goals, and nearly 90% believe that these goals “can be achieved.” Even if the actual number of Chinese people with these feelings and beliefs is smaller than these surveys suggest, it seems clear that the vast majority believe the Chinese Communist Party can and must decarbonize China.
What World to Come?
So far, China’s progress has been mixed. China had a banner year in 2024 for the construction of new coal-fired power plants, and the country missed its annual carbon intensity target (the amount of CO2 emitted per unit of GDP), despite its abundant build-out of clean energy. This does not mean, however, that China will not dismantle those very same power plants after 2030 since it’s possible China’s adding new capacity only as a temporary backup reserve. Massive heat waves in 2021 and 2022 drove China’s hydropower sources to some of their lowest historical levels while simultaneously spiking nationwide demand for air conditioning. In 2021, nearly two dozen Chinese provinces suffered power cuts and blackouts, in some areas lasting for weeks. Not only did factories shut down, but hundreds of millions of people lost power. Surely some people died. The government had to act, but China did not yet have enough high-voltage transmission lines, which transport energy long distances, to support a full build-out of renewables — renewables in China are often located far from power distribution. So, that same year, the CCP decided to use their domestic coal stores, whose infrastructure already exists, to establish more power capacity in preparation for those weeks of peak demand (even if those coal plants would not run near full capacity, or at all, during other times of the year, or remain in place for their full projected lifetimes). This strategy — which reversed the decline in China’s coal development after its 2013 peak — may have been wildly inefficient, but was deemed, apparently, a necessary compromise.
And it seems like the increased coal capacity did not lead to a commensurate increase in emissions. Analysts at the Center for Research on Energy and Clean Air, a Finnish nonprofit think tank, estimate that China’s emissions last year rose a mere 0.8% year-on-year. This amount is not much greater than last year’s U.S. emissions, which were essentially flat. It appears that even with China’s continued investment in domestic coal, it’s hardly more of a climate villain than America has been, even under a Democratic administration.
Since announcing in 2021 that it would no longer fund the construction of coal-fired power plants overseas, China has expanded its “all of the above” energy strategy into investments in the Global South. Many previously announced coal plants remain in the permitted, pre-permit and construction phases, but China has also pledged to increase its lending for what it calls “small and beautiful” renewable energy projects, especially across Africa. At a late January summit in Tanzania, it got an assist from the World Bank, which invested in Chinese solar over U.S. fossil energy to get electricity to Africans at the least cost and the greatest speed. Meanwhile, Trump sent his Energy Secretary, Chris White, to Africa to promote coal development. Yet even as the Trump regime tries to open new markets for fossil-energy companies, the economics favor China’s green partnerships with the Global-South partners. The biggest importers of Chinese solar panels last year, after the Netherlands, were Brazil, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and India.
“Even as the Trump regime tries to open new markets for fossil-energy companies, the economics favor China’s green partnerships with the Global-South partners.”
If the United States does not throw off fossil-fuel interests, its global power will likely decline regardless of whether China actually fulfills its 1+N commitments. Say the United States continues to deny the reality of climate change, and China does not decarbonize. The world will surely heat up to around 3 degrees Celsius over preindustrial temperatures in the next decades (and more beyond). The damage to the United States would be substantial. One recent National Bureau of Economic Research working paper estimating the economic harms of climate change concludes that climate change is slated to do so much damage to the United States alone that even our unilateral decarbonization would be more cost-effective than maintaining its fossil-fuel economy. Nor are these damages far off in the future. Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell is now warning that it will be impossible to get a mortgage in some high-risk areas within 10 to 15 years, which will threaten the stability of the entire U.S. housing market.
And, of course, economic damages do not always account for what unchecked climate change will do to Americans’ lives. If the planet heats up 3 degrees Celsius over preindustrial temperatures, it is likely that every summer the entire East Coast up to Maine, the Midwest to the Great Plains, and half of California would be so hot that staying outdoors would put even a healthy person at risk of death. Parts of Southern California, the Southwest, the Deep South and Florida would be deadly hot for about half the year. (And this doesn’t include the heat of heatwaves — which are projected to increase in frequency, virulence, and duration — nor any other projected catastrophes that occur as a result of such heat.) Insofar as they have an agenda beyond immediate profit, technology companies and business interests who have allied themselves with climate deniers must understand that an AI sector built on fossil fuels is quite literally unsustainable.
Conversely, if the United States continues to pursue Trump’s so-called “drill, baby, drill” agenda, and China does successfully enact its current climate policies, showing a real decline in its emissions starting in the next five years, China will be positioned to assume the geopolitical leadership ceded by America on this existential issue. And in that case, China could attempt to compel U.S. cooperation by establishing a legally binding treaty to phase out fossil fuels and an international trading bloc to sanction nations that refuse to become party to it. The treaty would likely need to exist outside the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change because UN rules require any climate agreement be signed by all parties to the Convention (which gives any one state the power to block any agreement it deems counter to its interests). But a Chinese-led fossil-fuel treaty could include, at first, the European Union and much of the Group of 77 — nations that have been asking the United States to make legally binding emissions commitments since the 1997 Kyoto Protocol.
Eventually, this treaty would need to include India. Arguably, India could be brought on board with a Chinese/European version of the climate Marshall Plan: a treaty-established fund for India’s investments in solar farms, flexible power grids, energy-storage facilities and so on. Right now, relative to the U.S. and European Union, India faces high interest rates on development financing. In 2023, Fatih Birol, head of the International Energy Agency told The New York Times that a loan to build a solar farm in India is roughly three times more expensive than it is in Europe. An international mechanism that made phasing out fossil energy an immediate economic benefit to India could be a global game changer.
China, in concert with treaty signatories, could also establish an International Hydrocarbon Agency to manage the phase-out of fossil fuels across parties and establish border carbon adjustments to equalize prices based on the carbon content of goods traded with non-party nations. (This is well within the realm of the possible: The EU has already enacted a functional Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism.) Such a mechanism would certainly not benefit the U.S. so long as it still ran a fossil-fuel economy. Columbia University’s Jason Bordoff and Harvard University’s Meghan O’Sullivan together have suggested that, over time, border price adjustments could morph into steep tariffs aimed at pressuring slow or resistant nations to pursue tougher climate policies. “In a world in which carbon emitters are increasingly seen as threats to international peace and security,” Bordoff and O’Sullivan argue, “sanctions could become a common tool to force laggards to act.”
“If the United States continues to pursue Trump’s so-called ‘drill, baby, drill’ agenda, and China does successfully enact its current climate policies … China will be positioned to assume the geopolitical leadership ceded by America on this existential issue.”
Any of these actions would threaten American economic and ideological hegemony. Together they could be devastating. This is why Chinese support for clean energy and its comprehensive climate-policy commitments should be understood as part and parcel of Xi’s ambition to have China lead “the world in terms of composite national strength and international influence by the middle of the century.” As Jake Sullivan, who served as President Biden’s national security advisor, said in a 2021 speech at the United States Institute of Peace: “China is essentially making the case that the Chinese model is better than the American model. And they’re pointing to dysfunction and division in the United States and saying … their system doesn’t work. Our system does.”
Even before the election of Donald Trump for a second presidential term, Chinese state media frequently criticized America for its polarization and paralysis on climate-related issues. For example, after the 2022 Supreme Court ruling that states could not put caps on carbon emissions under the Clean Air Act, a Chinese spokesperson, Liu Pengyu, sniped that “these self-contradictory moves make the world question the U.S.’s capability and seriousness.”
Of course, in our moment of political upheaval, it seems foolhardy to predict the future. And with China especially, it’s always challenging for outsiders to know exactly what’s happening. But one thing is for sure: If China achieves its dual carbon goals while the United States remains stymied by its fossil-fuel interests, not only will China continue to dominate the climate technology market — a key sector of future prosperity — but it will also establish its brand of authoritarian, state-run capitalism as the form of governance most capable of resolving the climate crisis. Such an outcome would be a tragedy for human freedom that America not long ago would have done everything in its power to prevent.
