China’s climate envoy humiliates the EU

The European Union came to COP 30 in Belem confident that it could supplant the absent Americans and lead the world with the example of its own plans to achieve Net Zero by 2050.  A minor adjustment of the intermediate 2035 goal to 66.3 per cent of 1990 levels was needed to achieve EU consensus with member states alarmed at the potential economic impact of the bloc’s Net Zero campaign.  The contrast with the United States, whose President Donald Trump has declared the purported climate crisis a “hoax” would not be clearer. With a new agreement on national carbon emissions at Belem, the European Union would expand its declared role as the regulatory superpower and displace the retrograde Americans as the leader of multilateral environmental diplomacy.  

What the EU did not expect was public humiliation at the hands of China’s climate envoy Liu Zhenmin, who labelled the slight relaxation of the bloc’s 2035 goals as “shameful.”  He also questioned the EU’s ability to lead given its problematic “internal coordination” on common policies.  Zhenmin then condemned the bloc’s passion for imposing “unilateral trade measures,” taken by delegates to include the Carbon Border Adjustment Measure, a non-tariff barrier that will punish the Chinese steel industry.  One cannot imagine a diplomatic démarche more directly aimed at the EU’s particular political neuroses: Its lack of full executive authority over its 27 members, its need to exclude an obvious eco-policy like the CBAM from Belem despite the harm it imposes on developing economies and most of all its looming realisation that China regards it as a supplicant in need of its markets rather than a peer worthy of partnership.

When dealing with the brutal mercantilists in Beijing, the European Union will always suffer from the organisational deficiencies that prevent the formation of a common foreign policy. The bloc cannot marshal the full capacity of its collective economy in the service of global objectives, and it cannot respond to Chinese economic predation by mobilising revenues from a (non-existent) taxing authority.  Piggybacking on Germany’s credit rating to float bonds is an awkward substitute for the direct control of tax revenues enjoyed by true national governments.  China knows it can mobilise capital and policies far quicker than the EU can respond.

Beyond the structural limitations that preclude the EU from dealing with China as a direct rival, the EU suffers from an institutional delusion that sacrifices the material interests of its members for the millenarian idols of environmentalism.  The EU’s delegation at Belem contains few diplomats schooled in the defence of national interests, but many career activists devoted to saving the planet from evil industrialists.  While the EU sees the COP process as humanity uniting against the threat of climate catastrophe, every other nation seeks its national advantage.  Poor nations seek massive handouts from a climate compensation fund while wealthier nations are happy to shift the burden of carbon reductions onto gullible European industrialists and their bureaucratic masters.

Given that China will never embrace a climate agreement that doesn’t serve its goal of global pre-eminence, it would behove the EU to examine exactly how China uses institutions like COP and the WTO to advance that objective.  Shaming the EU into adopting more rigorous Net Zero plans serves Chinese aims by deindustrialising a major competitor.  The cost burden of the EU’s climate plans are already driving industry out of the continent, in some cases like chemicals giant BASF, straight to China with its low energy costs.  European manufacturing requires cheap energy to compete with low Asian wages, yet even with the loss of Russian gas, the EU remains determined to punish its leading exporters with high input costs and onerous environmental reporting requirements.  Mandates to replace fossil fuels with renewables are unachievable without massive imports of Chinese solar panels and the rare earth minerals needed to make wind turbines.  Put simply, the EU’s Net Zero plans are an indispensable part of China’s plan to subordinate the continent economically, and clear the way for Chinese export domination.  

A quick review of China’s actions, as opposed to its diplomatic statements, reveals the hard truths behind China’s ostensible cooperation in Belem.  In 2024, China added nearly 95 gigawatts of coal-fired capacity, or roughly double the entire energy consumption of Great Britain.  Beijing clearly has no plans to abandon coal anytime soon, and only offered a seven per cent reduction from an unspecified emissions peak at Belem.  For those poor EU diplomats struggling with the math, a seven per cent reduction from an unknown figure is nothing at all.  Left completely aside is the idea that China would ever allow an independent audit of its emissions. This is a country that considers air quality measures a national security secret. The notion that European specialists will one day crawl around China’s coal and steel plants to confirm compliance with Beijing’s COP commitments is simply ludicrous. Nor can the EU count on an independent press or Chinese NGOs to verify Beijing’s environmental statements.

Europe’s forced march over the Net Zero cliff will cripple the exporting industries critical to European prosperity, while opening the continent to a flood of exports from China.  China has no intention of imposing the same sort of restrictions on its own industries, and will decarbonise only to the extent that it serves China’s national interest.  The world’s second largest economy still clings to its WTO status as a developing country allowing it to protect its domestic industries and drive European exporters out of global markets with massive capital subsidies.  What European car maker can compete with Chinese electric car maker BYD? None of them.

While the EU pretends that international institutions instil habits of cooperation, the history of these organisations reveals that nations either ignore them or compete within them for economic and political advantage. The EU’s delusion that it leads a global mission to save the world from environmental catastrophe renders it helpless in any competition with realist powers seeking national advantage.  The absence of the US at Belem has left the EU without an ally equipped with a similarly hard-nosed agenda at the conference.  Until the EU grasps that its environmental diplomacy must derive from its economic self-interest, it will be victimised by powers that do.  Until then, the EU won’t be China’s peer, but its prey.