China Is Writing the Story of the Climate Future
By David Wallace-Wells
Credit...Illustration by Ibrahim RayintakathThey called it a “summer of disasters” in June, and as the summer wore on, the pattern held: unprecedented extreme temperatures across South Asia; then two distinct heat waves across the United States, bringing health advisories to a total of 200 million people; and three heat waves across Europe, where thousands died and rivers shriveled too much for boats to pass and warmed too much for nuclear power plants to cool off.
There were deadly monsoon rains in Bangladesh, the worst in more than a century, and then, in Pakistan, much worse: a third of the country submerged, more than a thousand dead and a million homes destroyed.
But for climate scientists, the most conspicuous weather event of the summer may have been the simultaneous heat and drought blanketing most of China.
The country has been experiencing extreme heat for almost three months, affecting more than 900 million people.
As many as 66 rivers in a single municipal area, around Chongqing, have “dried up,” according to the state broadcaster CCTV. As the weather historian Maximiliano Herrera put it memorably to New Scientist, “there is nothing in world climatic history which is even minimally comparable.”
And yet for a weather event this exceptional, you could be forgiven for not knowing too much about it.
China is the world’s most populous country and by far its largest greenhouse gas emitter, and it may well be the most determinative force shaping the future of the planet.
But for most Americans, it’s as if climate change is happening there only behind a screen.
In part, that is because while China is not exactly a closed country, it isn’t exactly an open one either, which gives the reporting that does emerge the unreliable aura of eerie anecdote.
There has been no reporting about what the extreme heat has meant for people living in the Xinjiang region, for instance, one of the two centers of the heat wave and home to camps where possibly more than a million Uyghurs and other non-Han natives of the area have been detained, many of them laboring under reportedly oppressive conditions — often in the country’s dominant solar panel industry.
The human toll of the heat wave is surely greater than we know.
But it isn’t only lack of information that blinds us.
An unprecedented climate episode in China is also hard for Americans to process because the country occupies such an unsettled role in the stories we tell ourselves, and try to tell the world, about warming — often moralistic ones, about good actors and bad, guilt and innocence.
When extreme weather strikes China, the “meaning,” beyond the obvious one, is more muddled.
If we don’t know what to make of China, the climate actor, we have a much harder time making sense of its climate suffering.
For years, China has served as a convenient rhetorical touchstone for the climate-minded on both left and right — often described as a bad actor and unreliable partner by climate and energy nationalists, and by agitated environmentalists as an example of what could be done, climatewise, given a political structure without so many troublesome veto points.
These contradictory depictions have always depended much more on casual stereotype than genuine insight.
But like any useful talking point, they are also built on something real.
China is not just the world’s largest climate polluter but is responsible now for about half of all global coal use and almost a third of all global carbon emissions — a growing share, and more than twice the American contribution.
(Though on a per-capita basis, the United States is still doing much worse.)
But if China is doing much more damage now to the future of the climate than any other nation, it is also the case that the country has been the strongest force for clean energy over the past decade.
Last year, China installed more renewable capacity than was rolled out in the United States, Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, Southeast Asia and Africa combined.
And although the plunge in the price of renewables is often regarded as an authorless global market success story, probably the largest contribution to that price collapse has been investment and innovation in Chinese manufacturing (quite a lot of it under horrifying conditions in Xinjiang).
If the story ended there, it would be confounding enough: China, as a global behemoth, simultaneously playing hero and villain.
But China also seems to occupy a confusing place in the landscape of climate geopolitics because that landscape has shifted lately as well.
Ten years ago, or even five, climate diplomacy often meant rhetorical appeals to global cooperation mixed with realpolitik efforts to move more slowly than your rivals.
Today, decarbonization is still happening much too slowly, but fast enough to move the diplomatic dynamics away from a rivalry of inaction toward an apparent rivalry of action.
Climate investment is booming in the United States, and with the CHIPS act and the I.R.A. climate bill now passed into law, the country has affirmatively joined what Politico recently called a new “green-energy arms race.”
The power dynamics are shifting, too, not just in terms of trade deals, saber-rattling about Taiwan and China’s recent cancellation of bilateral climate talks after Nancy Pelosi visited Taipei.
Since the global financial crisis, but especially since the election of Donald Trump and the bungling of the early American pandemic response, those indulging narratives of American decline often looked to China as a forbidding and inevitable successor: endowed with an overwhelming population, directed by a relatively frictionless model of booming state capitalism and unencumbered by the kinds of political dysfunction that seem unavoidable here.
The country remains an obvious geopolitical rival, and just passed the United States in one measure of scientific contribution: publishing the world’s most-cited journal papers.
But recent events have complicated that uncomplicated picture of China’s near future.
First, it turns out that the country isn’t as big as we thought it was — and it is on track to get quite a bit smaller.
The U.N. now projects that China’s population may drop by as much as half by the end of the century, as it also ages steeply — a prediction more or less echoed by the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences.
Second, the “Chinese model” is looking less enviable, economically, given the sudden collapse of the country’s real estate and construction industries, a mass refusal to make mortgage payments across the country and such anemic growth figures that, alone in the developed world, the Chinese central banks are lowering their interest rates, amid significant inflation, out of even higher concern about the continuing recession.
As recently as a year ago, it was widely predicted that China’s economy would become the world’s biggest as soon as the end of this decade; now some economists are wondering whether it ever will.
And third, the country’s pandemic response, once the envy of the world, has become something more like a global joke, with citywide lockdowns still following from individual new cases and a national vaccination program that has not managed to reach even many of the most vulnerable elderly, with Chinese shots that the government doesn’t seem to trust all that much to protect against death and severe disease.
This doesn’t mean that a “China bubble” is about to pop; that the country is anything other than the world’s most consequential, for climate; or that the unsteady relationship between it and the United States is going to become any less important.
But in early September, analysis by Carbon Brief showed that, thanks largely to pandemic shutdowns and a stuttering economy, Chinese emissions fell by almost 8 percent in the second quarter of 2022, compared with the previous year — a larger drop than the country experienced in the depths of pandemic lockdown.
In the midst of the pandemic, which temporarily lowered global emissions about 7 percent, climate watchers noted both that this was about the rate of decarbonization required to meet the most ambitious targets of the Paris agreement and that global shutdown was not a sustainable or appealing way to do it.
But while China won’t be following that path indefinitely, it is the path the country is on now — another reminder that the green transition will be both bumpier and more surprising than it looks on a graph from the I.P.C.C.
And that no country’s role in the morality play will stay fixed for long.
David Wallace-Wells (@dwallacewells), a writer for Opinion and a columnist for The New York Times Magazine, is the author of “The Uninhabitable Earth.”
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