China is committed to the energy transition needed to avert climate breakdown – but does not want to take the lead alone in the absence of the US, one of the country’s senior advisers has told the Guardian.
Wang Yi said China would provide more money to vulnerable countries, but the EU’s climate commissioner has warned Beijing is not doing enough to cut emissions.
“I don’t think China would like to play a leadership role alone,” said Wang, the vice-chair of China’s expert panel on climate change. “The most important thing is how to maintain momentum. Now we have two possible directions: one, we go forward with clearer, more ambitious targets. The other may be going back.
“So that’s why China would like to do our best to steer in this kind of direction towards low-carbon or green transition, but in cooperation with other countries. We don’t want to take the lead alone. We need comprehensive leadership.”
In an exclusive interview, Wang said theChinese president, Xi Jinping, was committed to the energy transition for the long haul despite resistance from some industrial sectors. He explained that China’s priority in Belém was to help the Brazilian presidency achieve a successful climate conference, and to show the benefits of multilateral decision-making. On Tuesday, the first draft of a possible agreement was published at the Cop30 summit, reviving the hotly contested plan to transition away from fossil fuels.
China is the planet’s biggest emitter of carbon dioxide from burning of coal, oil and gas, but it is now also a world leader in the production, installation and export of wind turbines, solar panels and electric cars.
He said China wanted to “speed up and scale up its efforts to provide more global public goods” despite serious geopolitical and economic tensions and unilateral barriers to trade, including tariffs. The country’s emissions have been flat or falling for 18 months.
He estimated China’s per capita power consumption would continue to grow from 7,000 kilowatt hours in 2024 to “well over 10,000, maybe 12,000” – but there would be a steady move away from fossil fuels to wind and solar, as well as green hydrogen, green ammonia and electric vehicles. Along with a new power grid system, he said the country was in the midst of a “comprehensive green transition of social economic development”.
As in many countries, Wang suggested there was some resistance to change, but the president had sent a clear signal about the direction of travel. “Even in China, we have a lot of industrial conflict … but the central government, including President Xi, is very clear to us that we must, in the next five years’ time, speed up the new power system.”
In the absence of the US, China’s role is even more crucial than usual to the success or failure of Cop30, where the Brazilian president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, has urged his negotiators to lay the foundations for an exit ramp out of the fossil fuel era.
Wang, who is an ecological economist and standing member of China’s state congress, said a roadmap would be challenging – particularly if it tried to impose a single set of criteria. “I think it’s very difficult. We cannot have a unified pathway for a phasedown or phaseout,” he said. “Different countries, based on different conditions, have different strategies and different transition pathways.”
He added that Trump’s second term would have a bigger impact than his first because the US had adopted more aggressive anti-climate policies. He also noted that the European Union was distracted by the war in Ukraine and economic problems.
After Trump’s imposition of hefty tariffs, Wang said progress on spreading green technology was being slowed by trade barriers, which particularly affected developing nations. He was also concerned about the high price of carbon in Europe: “I think some countries have double standards. On the one hand, they want China to speed up, to reduce our emissions, to take the lead, but on the other hand, they worry about China’s competitive capacity and also very important, maybe security … because there are very high ratios of China’s products.”
Despite the considerable gap between nations’ plans to cut emissions and what is needed to hold temperatures to 1.5C, he said China did not want to discuss targets at this Cop summit.
On the crucial issue of climate finance, Wang urged Europe and other early industrial nations to step up to the goal of providing $1.3tn (£988bn) for poorer nations to move their economies away from fossil fuels – and adapt to the growing threat of droughts, floods, extreme heat and more violent storms.
Wealthier countries have argued that China is now rich enough to make a contribution. Wopke Hoekstra, climate commissioner for the EU, said China needed to take more responsibility for cutting carbon, adding: “China is by far the world’s largest emitter; according to the UN it is an upper middle income country. It is responsible for more than 30% of global emissions.
“So at the moment China is not doing what science expects it to do – that has effects way beyond China itself. That is why we would hope to see more Chinese ambition going forward.”
He said the EU had made a strong diplomatic push to forge common interests with China on climate issues at a series of meetings this year. But the trading bloc has angered Beijing with a tariff that penalises imports of high-carbon goods such as steel coming from countries with inadequate policies in place to cut emissions. The lack of a strong public alliance between the EU and China leaves a gap in global climate diplomacy.
Wang said China was planning to increase its financial contributions to the global south, and that the government’s draft five-year plan mentioned the provision of “more global public goods”.
The Brazilian presidency of Cop30 has begun the process of releasing iterations of draft decision texts on all of the topics under discussion. The most closely watched is the “mutirao decision” which takes in contentious issues on which there is so far little agreement: finance, transparency, trade and the fact that countries’ emissions-cutting plans fall drastically short of the stringent cuts needed to limit global heating to 1.5C, a goal of the Paris agreement.
On Tuesday, a group of more than 80 countries called for the conference to address the “transition away from fossil fuels” that was agreed at Cop28 in Dubai, but which has not been followed up since. Brazil included options for starting the process of drawing up a roadmap for such a phaseout in the draft text, but these are likely to come under fierce attack from Saudi Arabia and its allies, including Russia, Bolivia and others.
