By: Kate Logan and Li Shuo

Climate change, and how to confront it, is one of the most politicized issues in the American political system. Regardless of how U.S. politicians talk about climate change, its effects are increasingly dire for Americans and the entire world — including many vulnerable populations in Asia. With the United States and China accounting for around 40% of annual greenhouse gas emissions globally, the speed and scale of their collective emissions reductions will largely determine the future magnitude of economic and human damages. Moreover, how the United States and China implement climate policy and interact will also shape geopolitics, especially for Asian economies that depend on fossil fuels or those rich in minerals and technologies needed for clean energy.

The nature of climate change as a common global challenge previously enabled the United States and China to forge a uniquely cooperative relationship on the issue. U.S.-China joint action famously laid the groundwork for the landmark Paris Agreement in 2015, while tempering bilateral tensions. Former President Donald Trump’s subsequent withdrawal from the Paris Agreement, however, irrevocably damaged this cooperation, along with global trust in the United States as a climate leader. And the recent emergence of U.S. economic competitiveness with China as a rare area of bipartisan consensus has further complicated the issue, as U.S. policy responses aiming to limit China’s global dominance in essential clean technologies including solar panels and electric vehicles are seen as counterproductive to the global clean energy transition. Despite this, President Joe Biden and his vice president, Kamala Harris — now the Democratic presidential nominee — have supported climate cooperation as a critical area of U.S.-China convergence.

This is the backdrop against which this year’s U.S. election is playing out: two parties that largely align in their view of China as the top U.S. competitor, but who hold starkly polarized views toward climate policy as an economic enabler, in Harris’s and the Democrats’ case, or as a barrier to growth that must be dismantled, as Trump and his supporters contend. The stakes are high — for U.S.-China relations, as well as for the health and safety of our planet.

U.S.-China Climate Engagement under the Biden Administration

The Biden administration complemented its domestic “whole-of-climate” approach with a dedicated strategy to reinstate and leverage U.S. leadership for global climate progress. At the core of this diplomacy were efforts to engage with China to convince the world’s largest emitter to raise its climate ambition. Key U.S. “asks” included ending coal power, reducing methane and other non-carbon “super pollutants,” and aligning targets for near-term emissions reductions and net zero emissions with a 1.5°C warming pathway. Upon taking office and rejoining the Paris Agreement, Biden installed former U.S. secretary of state John Kerry as the nation’s first-ever special presidential envoy on climate change. This prompted China into appointing veteran climate negotiator Xie Zhenhua back into a corresponding role. The dynamic of these two climate envoys created a clear and dedicated platform for U.S.-China climate engagement.

Despite tense bilateral relations, the first year of the Biden administration saw meaningful progress with China. Kerry traveled to China twice in 2021: first in April to Shanghai, which delivered the U.S.-China Joint Statement Addressing the Climate Crisis, and second in August to Tianjin, which paved the way for another joint declaration both countries later released at COP26 in Glasgow. China’s President Xi Jinping also participated in the virtual Leaders Summit on Climate convened by President Biden in April and indicated that China would join the Kigali Amendment to the Montreal Protocol and strictly control coal. In September, at the UN General Assembly, Xi further announced that China, as the largest supporter of overseas coal power plants, would impose a moratorium on such projects. All of these developments can be seen as Beijing’s nod to long-standing pushes from Washington.

Bilateral tensions started to have a negative impact on the U.S.-China climate relationship in 2022. Beijing suspended climate talks with Washington as a retaliatory measure after U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan in August. The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) passed around the same time; while strengthening Washington’s climate credibility, exacerbated trade tensions with China. As a result, Chinese officials ramped up their rejection of separating the climate agenda from the broader bilateral relationship, stressing that if the overall relationship is the encroaching “desert,” it is not possible to preserve the “oasis.” Even though subsequent efforts helped restore climate dialogues in late 2022 and saw the adoption of the Sunnylands Agreement in 2023 and the launch of a bilateral working group on climate change in early 2024, the climate relationship continues to suffer from heightened U.S.-China tensions and could only progress within the boundaries defined by this competitive relationship.

The Harris Scenario

The rapid coalescing of Democrats behind Kamala Harris as their presidential candidate in the wake of Biden’s decision to forgo a second term opens up a unique opportunity to reset the dynamic of U.S.-China climate cooperation. Harris has long championed climate action, spanning from her days as San Francisco district attorney to more recent leadership, including her participation as the highest-level U.S. representative at COP28 last year in Dubai. Furthermore, she also has a relatively blank slate when it comes to directly engaging China, having only met Xi briefly on the sidelines of APEC in 2022 — in contrast to Biden, who had already met Xi during a China visit as vice president in 2011. Harris therefore has an opening to shift the U.S. economic and climate rhetoric away from an obsessive focus on competition with China and toward a more domestic-focused angle.

To be clear, dialing down current trade tensions with China would require significant political resolve. It is by no means a likely scenario given the current U.S. domestic politics as well as the contentious U.S.-China relationship. But charting out a new course is necessary to not only enable more productive bilateral climate dialogues with Beijing, while also ensuring U.S. domestic policies achieve the triple objectives of addressing climate change, enhancing economic competitiveness, and strengthening national security.

In particular, making bilateral climate engagement more sustainable and secure over the next decade will be critical for any hope of preserving the Paris Agreement’s 1.5°C temperature limit. Countries’ new climate targets, or Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), are due in early 2024 and are expected to cover the coming ten years to 2035. China’s climate action during this time frame is especially significant as it will cover the trajectory of emissions after China’s promised pre-2030 peak. The extent to which China’s emissions plateau versus declining rapidly will influence the temperature pathway of the entire world.

Against this backdrop, a Harris presidency could tap into China’s desire to stabilize bilateral relations to reset the dynamic of bilateral climate cooperation. The foremost component of a reset would involvement high-level endorsement that climate progress can be enabled by both sides, and that disagreements on thornier issues should not block headway on the most existential ones. Beyond this, a reset could see both countries move beyond what they “can do” on less sensitive but climate-impactful topics, including methane and non-CO2 gasses, to what they “must do” – that is, reduce domestic emissions across all sectors at speed and scale, and help the rest of the world do the same while adapting to increasing climate impacts. It could also mean proactively engaging on challenging issues, such as U.S.-China trade tensions or energy security, to minimize their negative impacts on climate progress. Furthermore, both sides could expand and further institutionalize subnational and nonstate climate cooperation to buttress government-to-government engagement. These actions could protect and strengthen climate progress from a future climate-hostile president, while enabling a second Harris term or other climate-positive president to achieve even greater substantive progress.

The most salient opportunity for Harris, Biden, and the Democrats to put the U.S.-China climate relationship on a stronger footing as part of the coming political transition is a confluence of events at the end of this year. COP29 will take place over two weeks in Azerbaijan in November 2024 and begin less than a week after the U.S. election. APEC and the G20 Summit — which are the two most logical opportunities for current U.S. President Biden to next meet Xi Jinping in-person after their summit in San Francisco last year — will also convene during COP29. Should Harris be elected, this timing creates an opportunity for Biden and Xi (and potentially Harris, should she join such meetings) to inject momentum into climate talks by coordinating their messaging and even moving together on their respective NDCs, which they have both promised to submit before the UN deadline in February 2025. Taking such a bold step could help define a new phase of the bilateral climate relationship that moves beyond a “meet and disagree” dynamic to demonstrate that both countries are ready to invest together in climate progress. In a best case scenario, it could eventually enable both sides to pursue joint goals and actions that advance global progress, such as by working together to supercharge much-needed climate finance and technologies for the Global South.

Beyond the diplomatic sphere, Harris could de-escalate rising tensions between U.S. industrial and trade policy and climate progress. During the Biden administration, U.S. policies — such as the Inflation Reduction Act and high tariffs on imported Chinese electric vehicles and other clean technologies — have been premised on advancing U.S. economic competitiveness vis-à-vis China. One driver of such policies has been Biden’s yet-to-be-proven belief that these policies might secure support from key labor constituencies in industrial-oriented swing states, such as Michigan and Pennsylvania. By shifting economic policies away from this focus and toward issues that resonate more directly with the broader middle class, Harris could dial down forceful rhetoric blaming China’s overcapacity for U.S. industry’s woes. At the same time, she could reorient U.S. economic policy to prioritize minimizing the cost and maximizing the pace of the energy transition, while still taking action to address the risks created by China’s dominance of clean technology supply chains. Potential actions could focus on ensuring that tariffs on climate technologies have clear sunset policies to incentivize U.S. industry competitiveness and clarifying rules to incentivize Chinese foreign direct investment in clean technologies where it provides clear benefits to the U.S. with little risk.

The Trump Scenario

While the climate crisis calls for accelerated action, Trump’s election will portend a major retreat from ambition at both the domestic and international levels. In addition to repeating a retreat from previously made commitments to reduce emissions and provide support to developing countries, a Trump administration withdrawal from global climate action would tarnish any remaining U.S. climate credibility, blow off any hope for the world to stay below 1.5°C, and bring global climate efforts to an unprecedented crisis point. A Trump administration will shut down official climate exchanges with China, rendering bilateral exchanges to be carried by non-state and subnational actors. The sidelining of climate change in the U.S.-China bilateral agenda could foreclose any hope for significant bilateral climate achievement in the near future, a precondition for rapid global progress as demanded by climate science.

The damage a second Trump administration could create internationally starts from withdrawing the United States from the Paris Agreement again. On the 2024 campaign trail, Trump has consistently expressed his distaste for the Paris Agreement. In the first presidential debate in June, Trump claimed the climate treaty will “cost U.S. a trillion U.S. dollars” and is “a rip-off of the U.S.” A second Trump administration, if savvier than the first one, could also attempt to pull the United States out of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the broader legal framework that underpins the Paris Agreement. This attempt would create profound damage, potentially keeping the United States irreversibly out of the global climate regime, ending such a regime as we know it since its inception in the 1990s. On top of that, if Trump rolled back all of Biden’s key climate policies, the United States would be all but guaranteed to miss its 2030 climate target. Based on an analysis by Carbon Brief, Trump’s victory in November could lead to an additional 4 billion tonnes of U.S. emissions by the end of this decade.

The U.S.-China official climate dialogues, by no means a smooth sail under the Biden administration, nevertheless delivered incremental progress. Future dialogues will undoubtedly be called off by a reelected President Trump. If similar to Trump’s first term, this means the complete severance of bilateral climate engagement at the official level until at least 2029. As a result, actors in both countries will have to fall back to track 2 dialogues and engagement at the private sector and subnational levels. It remains to be seen how effective and resilient these mechanisms will be in maintaining the momentum of bilateral exchanges. But if these mechanisms fall off, what used to be a complex fabric of bilateral climate exchanges will be reduced to none, posing the biggest challenge for global climate progress.

Trump’s reelection will also present a set of thorny questions to Chinese climate officials. Starting from COP29 — held immediately after the election — Beijing will need to prepare its initial response to the likely coming changes in U.S. policy. If Trump is reelected, the rest of the world will crave enhanced action from China to fill the leadership void, so boilerplate lines from Chinese diplomats at COP29 will not cut it. Paradoxically, while four years of U.S. climate inaction could dampen China’s desire for progress, high ambition is precisely what the world will seek from Beijing. Chinese leaders may rise to the challenge or use Trump’s election as a convenient excuse for delaying further ambition. Another possibility is that they offer a muddled response, which will hardly provide assurance to multilateralism. Beijing’s difficult choice will carry profound implications for its upcoming 2035 climate targets and its domestic energy transition.

Chinese policymakers will also need to decide whether to work with the rest of the world while the United States is out of the climate scene. During the first Trump administration and as an effort to signal unwavering support for the Paris Agreement, China, together with the EU and Canada, created the Ministerial on Climate Action (MOCA), a high-level dialogue of climate ministers from key countries. So far, this has been the most notable step to demonstrate China’s willingness to provide diplomatic leadership by working across the traditional developed versus developing country dividing line. Whether China would be willing to continue this leadership role is to be determined. For MOCA, China’s challenging relationship with the other two co-chairs, Canada in particular and to a lesser extent the EU, and the shifting domestic politics in these countries, will certainly complicate their coordination.

The Paris Agreement did create a mechanism for countries to individually pursue climate action regardless of cooperation. However, if past experience serves as any reference, having the world’s largest economy pulling out of a global climate effort will undoubtedly weaken international climate determination over time. China is not immune to this dynamic. Trump’s climate backsliding will fuel conservative sentiment in Chinese domestic politics. Beijing will grow even more skeptical about Washington’s intentions or ability to follow through on political commitments. With heightened tension between Washington and Beijing, a second Trump administration will serve as a stronger excuse for Chinese climate inaction than in the past.

Recommendations

Three recommendations can be made about future U.S.-China climate engagement. Admittedly, these suggestions are less likely to be taken up by a Trump administration than by a Harris administration. But to the extent they can be adopted by a wide range of non-state actors, the next four years are still crucial to building back the conditions for a meaningful bilateral climate relationship regardless of who is elected in November.

First, despite the contentious bilateral agenda, top leaders in both the United States and China need to insulate the climate agenda from other conflicts to ensure progress. The last few years have seen bilateral tensions spilling into climate exchanges, capping the possibilities of these talks. Even though incremental progress was painstakingly achieved, the hard upper limit set in the bilateral relationship is becoming increasingly evident. Without redefining the role of climate change in the broader relationship, the world will need to live with the reality of divisive climate politics between Washington and Beijing. As a result, the global climate process will be slowed down significantly.

Second, the complex fabric of bilateral climate exchanges needs to be strengthened beyond the two governments. While engagement between them remains critical, it will continue to be challenging and insufficient to meeting individual or global climate goals. Both countries urgently need new forces to drive bilateral cooperation. Subnational and private sector actors need to be better organized. More people-to-people exchanges, at the researcher and future decision-makers levels, would also be helpful. This effort will make sure the current bilateral tensions do not disrupt the personal ties that are necessary for each country to understand the other and resolve or manage their differences over the long run.

Third, there needs to be a more clear-eyed strategy to manage industrial competition with China in the low-carbon sector. When it comes to most of the technologies needed to decarbonize, the reality is that China is leading the world in R&D, manufacturing, and deployment with a significant head start. This lead cannot be wished away by U.S. policymakers. Future U.S. administrations will need to carefully evaluate where to compete with China; where to learn from it; and what races may not serve U.S. political, economic, and climate interests and are therefore best avoided. Failing to set these clear priorities will not only delay near-term action in the United States but also make the politics of decarbonization more complicated.

Kate Logan is Director of Climate at the Asia Society Policy Institute and a Fellow with ASPI's Center for China Analysis.

Li Shuo is the Director of China Climate Hub at the Asia Society Policy Institute.