The mood at the Cop30 climate talks in Belém are, as my colleague Caroline O’Doherty reports, on a seesaw between optimism and gloom and with the United States stepping back, the European Union and China are under pressure to provide leadership. In today’s Global Briefing, I’m looking at how the summit is highlighting the different approaches to the climate crisis in Beijing and Brussels.
Rivals and partners in Belém
When the leaders of China and the European Union met for a summit in Beijing last July, they were at odds over everything from trade policy to the war in Ukraine. But one area where they could sing in harmony was on the need to pursue “a global just transition” on climate and to make this week’s Cop30 in Brazil a success.
Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Paris climate treaty has left the EU almost alone in Belém as a representative of the developed world, facing demands to accelerate its own decarbonisation and to help fund the cost of the crisis for poorer countries. China is both the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases and the global leader in renewable energy technology, burning half the world’s coal but installing more solar capacity each year than the rest of the world combined.
At the heart of the EU’s approach to decarbonisation is an emissions trading system (ETS) that tries to reduce the demand for fossil fuels by setting a high carbon price at about €78 a tonne. China’s focus is on making green energy technology such as solar panels, wind turbines and electric cars cheap and abundant but allowing industry to continue to use other energy sources cheaply, with carbon priced at about €7 a tonne.
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The EU’s carbon pricing policy works but it puts European industry at a competitive disadvantage, making it a model other economies are reluctant to follow if industrial giants such as China, the US and India are unwilling to. China’s cheap solar panels, two-thirds of which it exports, are helping developing countries, particularly in Africa, to generate more clean energy at a very low cost.
China’s emissions appear to have peaked but it will need to do more if it wants to accelerate decarbonisation beyond its current unambitious target of cutting emissions by 7-10 per cent by 2035. There are signs that Beijing is moving towards higher carbon pricing, and it expanded its own emissions trading scheme last year to include steel, aluminium and cement as well as power generation.
The EU and China face a test of their leadership in Belém and they will have to work together over the next two weeks if the Cop30 is to be a success. But both sides know that the summit, where delegates are being driven around in a fleet of Chinese-made electric vehicles, will also be a showcase for their competing models of development and modernisation.
- Please let me know what you think and send your comments, thoughts or suggestions for topics you would like to see covered to denis.globalbriefing@irishtimes.com
