Donald Trump famously called climate change a “hoax” perpetrated by the Chinese to make US manufacturing noncompetitive. But the evidence is staring us in the face: climate change is real and it is happening now. How else can we explain a 50-fold increase since 1980 in the number of places experiencing life-threatening or extreme heat; a surge in catastrophic hurricanes, flooding, and raging wildfires; North Pole temperatures that have soared 50 degrees Fahrenheit above normal; and an iceberg weighing one trillion tons breaking off Antarctica?

Every major scientific organization in the world agrees that the Earth’s climate is warming to dangerous levels and that humans are to blame. According to the World Meteorological Organization, current concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO₂) in the atmosphere correspond to a climate last occurring roughly 4 million years ago – a time when melting ice sheets caused sea levels to rise 60 feet higher than they are today.¹ Unless we act quickly and forcefully to drive down greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, we will soon reach a climate tipping point, where disastrous consequences will harm every aspect of our life on Earth.

China’s own climate scientists warn that it will face more frequent extreme weather events, glacier retreats, sea level rise higher than the world average, flooding, droughts, and food insecurity. Globally, experts predict that climate change will push an estimated 100 million people back into poverty by 2030,² and cause an additional 250,000 premature deaths each year between 2030 and 2050 from malnutrition, malaria, diarrhea, and heat stress.³ Rising sea levels may render more than 1,000 low-lying tropical islands “uninhabitable” by the middle of the century – or even earlier.⁴ The US Department of Defense called the impacts of climate change “threat multipliers that will aggravate stressors abroad such as poverty, environmental degradation, political instability and social tensions – conditions that can enable terrorist activity and other forms of violence.”⁵

In the landmark 2015 Paris Agreement, the world’s first truly global climate deal, nearly 200 countries agreed that the threat of climate change is “urgent and potentially irreversible” and can only be addressed through deep reductions in global carbon emissions. The deal aims to keep the rise in global average temperature to well below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels and, if possible, under 1.5 degrees. The participating countries resolved to peak global greenhouse gas emissions as soon as possible, with rapid reductions thereafter, and to achieve net zero GHG emissions in the second half of this century. The Paris Agreement sends a clear market signal that the global economy is transitioning away from dirty fossil fuels toward a low-carbon future powered by clean energy, creating the largest new market opportunity of the twenty-first century.

As a vitally important first step, every country signed up to the Agreement submitted a pledge detailing how it will cut its GHG emissions. When taken together, however, current pledges will deliver at most only one-third of what is needed to protect us from the worst impacts of climate change. To address the limitations of this bottom-up approach, the accord contains a mechanism designed to ensure that countries regularly strengthen their commitments over time. The Agreement also provides support for developing countries, including small island states and others that are most vulnerable, in their efforts to reach their climate goals. It also establishes a more robust transparency framework for reporting each country’s progress, though many of the operating rules have been left to future negotiations.

The United States and China are by far the two largest emitters of GHGs. Together, they are responsible for over 40 percent of global CO₂ emissions, though China’s per capita emissions are still less than half those of the United States. Despite longstanding tensions between the two countries on a broad range of issues, Presidents Barack Obama and Xi Jinping presided over a remarkable era of bilateral climate cooperation. This extraordinary partnership played a critical role in building momentum for the Paris Agreement and influencing the remarkable speed with which it entered into force. Both leaders recognized that accelerating the transition to a green, low-carbon, and climate-resilient economy is not only crucial to addressing one of the greatest threats facing humanity, but is also in each country’s own self-interest.

Yet despite support for the Paris Agreement from the overwhelming majority of US businesses and citizens, President Donald Trump has turned the United States into a global climate pariah. He has announced plans to withdraw America from the Agreement in 2020, slashed funding for US climate programs, attempted to dismantle the US Clean Power Plan, and promoted dirty fossil fuel development on US lands and in US waters. Furthermore, Trump muzzled US climate scientists and purged references to climate change risks from government websites and the US National Security Strategy. In July 2017, Trump stood alone at the annual G20 summit as the other 19 world leaders reaffirmed their strong commitment to the Paris Agreement and declared it to be “irreversible.” By abandoning the Paris Agreement, the United States has become the only country in the world to say “no” to the massive economic opportunities that accompany the transition to a clean energy future. Even Nicaragua and Syria, the only two original holdouts to the Agreement, have now signed on. Although Trump campaigned on a pledge to put “America First,” his reckless move effectively puts America last.

Many have noted that with Trump’s decision to pull out of the Paris Agreement, the United States is retreating from its global role in fighting climate change, while China is stepping forward. It was only a few years ago that China seemed the unlikeliest of climate action standard-bearers. After decades of rapid growth, the country held the distinction of being responsible for more than one-quarter of all global carbon emissions – more than the United States and the European Union combined. So mammoth was the nation’s carbon footprint, in fact, that it was often cited by defenders of the fossil fuel status quo as a rationale for American inaction. Why should we break our backs reducing our emissions, people would ask, when China is just going to keep on burning coal like crazy and warming the planet anyway?

But the dramatic measures taken by China in recent years to cut emissions, reduce its reliance on coal, and invest in renewables have turned this line of thinking on its head. It now appears that China – while still leading the world in both coal consumption and carbon emissions – is also leading the way forward to the clean energy future. That said, it also faces major challenges that some believe may be insurmountable.

In the December 2009 Copenhagen climate negotiations, China took much of the blame for the failure of participants to reach a legally binding climate agreement. Yet just a few years after the Copenhagen summit, President Xi Jinping not only played a crucial role in the Paris climate deal, but later called the Paris Agreement a “milestone in the history of climate governance” that should not be derailed. In a major speech to the National People’s Congress in fall 2017 to report on his first five years in office, Xi went even further, clearly asserting China’s climate leadership: “We will get actively involved in global environmental governance and fulfill our emissions reductions . . . Taking a driving seat in international cooperation to respond to climate change, China has become an important participant, contributor, and torchbearer in the global endeavor for ecological civilization.”⁶

How did China get to this point? What brought about this evolution from climate change resister to a forceful advocate of global climate governance? Can it overcome the fundamental obstacles hindering its decarbonization efforts? As it greens its own economy, is China in danger of outsourcing its carbon emissions to other countries? How is this clean energy revolution being driven, and what role can other countries play? This book seeks to shed some light on those questions and outline the implications for the United States and the rest of the world of China’s dynamic new engagement on this critical issue.