Toward a New Era of US Engagement with China on Climate Change

Abstract

If Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden wins in November 2020, climate change will suddenly be back at the center of the US political agenda. Even if President Trump wins a second term, we are entering a pivotal decade in determining whether we rule out moving to an emissions pathway that will avoid the most dangerous impacts of climate change. Given our respective contributions to global emissions, there is no global solution to climate change without the United States and China. As history has shown, demonstrating China's own leadership on climate change is crucial to US support for climate action,1 and USChina cooperation on climate change has proven pivotal to mobilizing international climate action.2 This paper therefore argues that a reset of the US-China relationship on climate change is crucial, and it lays out an agenda for how to move forward. Recognizing that the US-China relationship has fundamentally changed in the past few years and that any engagement will need to look different from how it has looked in the past, this paper explores what we can learn from the lessons of past cooperation to ensure that progress on addressing climate change does not become a casualty of a deteriorating US-China relationship.