By Scott Moore
Fighting climate change is supposed to be about cooperation for the common good. Or at least that has been the main message of every United Nations climate conference for the past two decades, the latest iteration of which just wrapped up. But high-minded calls to cooperate for the sake of the climate are increasingly running headlong into a hard-nosed reality: growing geopolitical competition between great powers. Unfortunately, geopolitics can make it harder for countries to work together to solve the climate crisis. But if you look carefully, they can also create opportunities to advance climate action.
This year’s climate conference took place in Baku, Azerbaijan – an improbable venue selected almost entirely because of geopolitics. In the United Nations system, regional groups take turns hosting the climate conference, and this year’s version was originally slated to take place in Central or Eastern Europe. But thanks to the rift with European nations following its invasion of Ukraine, Russia blocked any European Union country from holding the prestigious conference, known as the Conference of the Parties, or COP. Azerbaijan ended up being the consensus choice.
Geopolitics shaped this year’s COP in other ways, as well. The main issue was deciding on the future of climate finance, particularly the New Collective Quantified Goal (NCQG) – a new headline commitment to mobilize money to fight climate change. This goal is considered essential, especially by less developed nations, for taking additional steps to combat the world’s climate crisis. However, for the past two years, climate finance negotiations have been marked by calls for large developing countries, especially China, to pay up. These calls have been echoed by some American and European commentators who see them as a way to blunt China’s growing geopolitical influence.
However, making specific multilateral climate finance commitments is a nonstarter for Beijing, which insists that richer nations should shoulder the financial burdens of tackling climate change. This reluctance was an important factor in almost preventing agreement on the NCQG at COP29. In the end, though, China and other large developing economies succeeded in forestalling any additional climate finance commitments, with the final text calling instead for $300 billion a year in climate finance from developed countries by 2035 and additional voluntary contributions from developing nations.
Yet if this year’s COP shows how geopolitics can complicate and frustrate climate action, other examples show they can also help motivate efforts to reduce emissions and mobilize resources for adaptation. At first glance, the idea that geopolitics could be helpful to the world’s climate rather than harmful sounds odd. Yet, below the international level, there are several examples where geopolitical competition actually helped to drive important investments in climate policy.
One example comes from the United States’ most significant investment to date in climate policy, the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). Despite its name, the IRA was justified by President Biden largely as a means to compete with China. The IRA, Biden proclaimed in July 2022, would give America “the ability not only to compete with China for the future but to lead the world and win the economic competition of the 21st century.” This supposed capacity to help America prevail in a geopolitical competition with China remains popular, including with Republicans who otherwise view the IRA with suspicion.
Another case of geopolitics driving climate action comes from Europe. Prior to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, European nations were heavily dependent on Russian imported fossil fuels. Germany, the continent’s largest economy, relied on Russia for 90% of its gas supply. Following the invasion, however, European leaders moved swiftly to reduce dependence on Russian fossil fuels, in large part by replacing them with clean wind and solar power. “In the long run,” the European Commission announced in 2022, “EU energy security will be achieved by replacing imported fossil fuels with domestically produced renewable energy.” This investment had an impact: in 2023, the EU’s fossil fuel use fell by a record 19%, while wind and solar power generation posted even larger increases.
President Biden’s linkage of investment in clean energy and competition with China on the one hand and Europe’s efforts to bolster energy security in response to Russian aggression on the other highlight how geopolitics is increasingly driving climate action, both for better and for worse. And, to be sure, geopolitics presents other risks to decarbonization: recent tariffs imposed by the United States and the EU on Chinese-made clean technology have been justified in part by security concerns but might also increase the cost of clean energy.
It is important to understand when geopolitics can be helpful for climate action and when it is harmful. One helpful guideline is to be especially cautious in enacting protectionist trade policies regarding clean technology. Geopolitical competition may be most helpful to the climate when, as in the case of the IRA, it drives investment in clean technology research, development, and deployment. It is likely most harmful when, as in the case of tariffs, geopolitics threatens to raise the cost of clean technology and slow its spread. As a general rule, it is better to invest in clean energy than to restrict it, either through tariffs or other means.
Geopolitics are reshaping the world’s fight against climate change, both for better and for worse. However, even as geopolitics complicates cooperation between countries, they also offer new ways to coax them to do more to tackle the planet’s urgent climate crisis.
Scott Moore is Practice Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania where he leads the Penn Global Climate Security and Geopolitics Project.