The Global Climate Movement’s Real Elephant in the Room

The annual United Nations climate negotiation meeting, the Conference of the Parties (COP), ended last month. Unsurprisingly, the event was widely summarized as disappointing. In a particularly apt metaphor for the U.N.’s dysfunction, a pavilion at the event caught fire. But what caught my eye was the inevitable post-summit blame directed at Republicans for global climate inaction. A Politico piece about the COP stated (emphasis added), “U.S. President Donald Trump is the most obvious avatar for the geopolitical shifts confronting the talks.” Dear me, an avatar for the geopolitical shifts? 

Hyperbole aside, there is plenty to dislike about Trump’s climate posture. But it’s not the reason for the COP’s many shortcomings. The global climate movement’s real weakness stems from negotiators’ desire to foist climate burdens on the United States while offering nothing in return. While Politico noted that the absence of a U.S. delegation at the COP was an “elephant in the room,” the real elephant in the room is China’s surging emissions. Since 2005, the U.S. has cut greenhouse gas emissions more than any other nation, and if COP delegates want to deal seriously with Washington, they must reckon with the need for burden sharing.

As my fellow Dispatch Energy contributor Roger Pielke Jr. recently highlighted, the U.N. and media outlets alike often incorrectly credit the Paris Agreement for a massive cut in projected emissions. The truth, Pielke explains, is that the initial emissions projections were wildly off-base, and the Paris Agreement has likely had almost no impact on the actual trajectory of emissions.

Similarly, data reveals a big disconnect between what is said at the COP and what is happening on the global stage. While Democrats, foreign governments, and academics have criticized the United States’ withdrawal from the Paris Agreement, the truth is that from 2005 to 2019, we cut carbon dioxide emissions more than every other developed nation combined. Even amid Trump’s purge of climate regulations during his first administration, strong evidence shows that competitive energy markets in the U.S. continue to drive greenhouse gas abatement. 

This is in part because economic growth yields efficiency that in turn lowers emissions. So while climate-focused policies may lower emissions, they may do so at an economic cost, which forgoes the emission reductions that naturally come from a more energy-efficient economy. A good example of this phenomenon is the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan. The limits on carbon pollution from power plants never took effect due to a Supreme Court ruling, but the U.S. nevertheless beat its emission targets a decade early primarily thanks to more efficient natural gas production. These results were delivered by the free market, not regulation, but had the framework been implemented, Democrats would have inevitably credited it.

Meanwhile, the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter, China, has significantly increased its carbon footprint. From 2005 to 2019, for every metric ton of emission decline in the United States, China increased its own emissions by 3.74 metric tons.

China accounts for more than half of the world’s coal use. And while Beijing’s construction of renewable-energy power plants and electric vehicles is often praised in the media, China has also been rapidly building new coal power plants, hitting a 10-year high for new coal plant construction last year. Call me crazy, but I’m doubtful China is investing billions of dollars into new coal projects just to retire them soon. (Though some on the left argue that their coal plants are better than ours, so we shouldn’t worry about their massive share of emissions.) Ultimately, blaming Republicans for climate woes while praising China stands at odds with observable truth.

Given this context, Republican frustration with the dynamics of global climate policy is understandable. In a normal world, the nations making the most progress toward resolving a collective action problem would be praised while those falling behind would be chastised. But the dynamic is inverted for climate issues, and a reluctance to acknowledge the necessity of burden sharing is off-putting to many Republican policymakers. 

The climate strategy of making demands of the United States and the West while giving the rest of the world a pass is not a new phenomenon—before the Paris Agreement, there was the 1997 Kyoto Protocol (KP). The KP was the first major international climate treaty, and unlike the Paris Agreement, it set out firm targets for participants to meet. But the protocol did not seek equal commitments from all participants; instead, it divided the world into wealthy industrialized nations and poorer developing ones. Only the wealthy nations, like the United States, had to meet certain obligations, while other countries, like China, had none. Emission targets were pegged to 1990 levels, so former Soviet states met them by default due to the Soviet Union’s industrial collapse. The KP, put simply, asked Western nations to commit to climate action while exempting U.S. rivals. Unsurprisingly, the Senate never ratified the protocol, and when President George W. Bush later declined to participate, the Guardian featured the headline: “Bush kills global warming treaty.” 

The Paris Agreement was supposed to rectify these problems by asking nations to set their own voluntary targets. One might think this could have been an opportunity for the U.S. to negotiate directly with other big emitters for a reciprocal agreement. Yet what President Barack Obama revealed in a 2015 joint statement with China was that the United States would cut emissions by 26 to 28 percent, and China would agree to “peak” emissions by 2030. This deal amounted to “I’ll gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today,” but at the time was praised as groundbreaking.

Recognizing that this deal would never pass muster with the then-Republican-held Senate, the Paris Agreement was crafted so the administration could claim that it did not require ratification. Some legal scholars even argued that the international provision in the Clean Air Act gave Obama all the authority he needed to set any target he wanted under the Paris Agreement and regulate to meet it, circumventing Congress entirely. Unsurprisingly, fear of that regulatory tactic was what prompted Republicans to announce plans to withdraw from the Paris Agreement the first time back in 2017. 

This U-turn should have taught future presidents that they need to win over the public if they want international climate accords to have staying power. Yet when it was President Joe Biden’s turn in 2021, he largely pursued the same approach as Obama, making big promises while getting nothing in return from other global emitters. My own analysis of his administration’s target under the Paris Agreement found that of all the promised cuts from new pledges that year, 71 percent of the reduced emissions would have come only from the United States.

In short, it is foolish to expect Republicans who were sidelined from climate negotiations and policymaking under two administrations to uphold Democrat-championed climate deals. But it’s particularly so given those administrations’ reluctance to push other countries to share in their ambitious emissions reduction goals. 

To be clear, I have defended the Paris Agreement. It has potential as a negotiating tool that can circumvent the conventional barriers to global climate treaties and secure agreements that advance the interests of the United States. But the “elephant in the room” is not the reluctance of a large share of Americans to blindly support poorly negotiated emissions targets. It’s that nations like China, Russia, and India are given a pass for their dismal climate performance.

It wasn’t long ago that even climate hawks like John Kerry expressed frustration with the COP’s direction when it started focusing less on emissions abatement and more on ideas like “climate reparations.” And while Beijing is being praised for potentially peaking its emissions “early,” China’s projected 2025 emissions are about 20 percent higher than when it made the joint statement with Obama. Simply put, if COP delegates want more climate action from the United States, they must reckon with the need for reciprocity.

I applaud the intent of the COP, and I’ve defended the United States’ continued involvement in it. But climate hawks should be honest with themselves: Trump’s climate denial is not the source of the COP’s failures.