Trump, China, and Climate Change: What Happens Next?

The rollbacks are coming. Donald Trump’s incoming administration is expected to pull the United States out of the Paris Agreement, weaken the Environmental Protection Agency’s rules for power plants and tailpipe pollution, and — potentially — rewrite or repeal big swaths of the Inflation Reduction Act. Each of those actions would seem to provide an opening for the world’s No. 1 polluter — China — to assert global leadership and zip ahead in the next generation of clean energy technology.

How will it respond? On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob and Jesse chat with Jeremy Wallace, the A. Doak Barnett Professor of China Studies at Johns Hopkins University. Wallace, a Heatmap contributor, helps us understand how China is thinking about Trump, the current state of China’s economy, and why China sometimes flexes its climate leadership — but just as often doesn’t. Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap, and Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University.

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Here is an excerpt from our conversation:

Jesse Jenkins: While we have no idea what is in Trump’s head, he does have a set of voices around him. To the degree that you can see and briefly summarize those camps, Jeremy, what, what do you … What is he going to be hearing? What are the dominant intellectual threads, or self-interested economic-motivated threads that he’s likely to hear from different parts of his coalition?

Jeremy Wallace: I would say three different camps. There will be as many as different advisors, but I think summarizing it into three different camps is helpful. There’s a Lighthizer camp that … Lightizer comes out of the steel industry, and thinking about domestic steel manufacturing and national security. So that’s a camp, and that’s a tariff, tariff, tariff world. We can China decouple in order to reduce their power.

There’s a Musk camp, who is probably just singular, that is simultaneously extremely kind of right-wing in its orientation, but also runs a multi-trillion-dollar company that is principally Chinese-produced, and Chinese demand — not only, by any means, but is a major portion of that business. And then there is the, there are the Wall Street billionaires that we’re talking about as Treasury Secretary, where there is an interest in continued economic relations and not destroying U.S. credibility to pay its own debts, to make sure that the economy continues to run.

And I think all of those would have very different views about what U.S.-China policy should be. There’s a Pentagon wing, right? There’s all kinds of other voices, as well. But I think from Trump world, I think those are probably the three principal voices that he actually cares about. And I don’t know what the right … I don’t know what the policies will be, other than my guess is that there would be a lot of cycling between those three different views.

This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by …

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Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.