The Trump administration fired the last of the US climate negotiators earlier this month, helping cement America’s withdrawal from international climate diplomacy. It may also have handed a huge victory to China.
The elimination of the State Department’s Office of Global Change — which represents the United States in climate change negotiations between countries — leaves the world’s largest historical polluter with no official presence at one of the most consequential climate summits in a decade: COP30, the annual UN climate talks in Belém, Brazil, in November.
Without State’s climate staff in place, even Capitol Hill lawmakers who usually attend the summits have been unable to get accredited, a source familiar with the process said.
COP30 is intended to be a landmark summit, setting the global climate agenda for the next 10 years — an absolutely crucial decade as the world hurtles toward ever more catastrophic levels of warming.
The US is “abandoning its responsibilities in the midst of a planetary emergency,” said Harjeet Singh, a longtime climate advocate, COP negotiations veteran and founding director of Satat Sampada Climate Foundation, a climate justice organization.
The US role in climate negotiations has always been marked by contradiction, he told CNN. “It has championed ambition in rhetoric while expanding domestic fossil fuel extraction.” But its absence creates a “dangerous vacuum,” he said.
One of President Donald Trump’s first acts in office was to pull the US out of the Paris climate agreement, which he also did in his first term. The elimination of the State climate office is yet another sign of the administration’s hard line rejection of climate action.
A State Department spokesperson said “any relevant related work will be managed in other offices in the Department as appropriate.” They did not directly respond to CNN’s question on whether it would send representatives to COP30.
Experts fear the US absence may derail climate ambition. Wealthy countries, including those in Europe, may use it as a “license to backtrack,” said Chiara Martinelli, director of Climate Action Network Europe, a coalition of climate non-profits. Poorer countries may lose faith in the process, she told CNN.
But most significantly, it could hand a geopolitical advantage to China, allowing America’s most formidable global competitor to position itself as a more reliable and stable global partner, experts told CNN.
The State Department spokesperson did not comment on what the US withdrawing from Paris would mean for China.
China is building out clean energy at a blistering pace, as the US takes a chainsaw to its wind and solar sectors and makes a hard turn back toward fossil fuels.
“It is likely that China’s voice will be heard more loudly (at COP30), as they have identified growth in green technologies as a key pillar of their economic strategy,” said Joeri Rogelj, a climate scientist at Imperial College London.
In a statement to CNN, China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs called climate change a “common challenge faced by mankind.”
“No country can stay out of it, and no country can be immune to it,” the Chinese statement said.
The question is whether China will make good on the strong language, and lead by example without its world-power counterpart. All countries have until September to submit new goals to limit climate pollution over the next decade, and China has a history of setting weak targets for itself. Meanwhile, it continues to power plants that run on coal — the most polluting fossil fuel.
These goals will provide a road map for climate action between now and 2035, and China, being the world’s most-polluting country, will help determine the planet’s climate trajectory.
China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs did not answer specific questions about its forthcoming goals, but said the country “will work with all parties concerned” to “actively respond to the challenges of climate change, and jointly promote the global green and low-carbon transformation process.”
The US has traditionally pushed China to make more ambitious pledges, with varying degrees of success. Climate was the one bright spot in an otherwise strained US-China relationship under the Biden administration. The two nations struck a significant deal nearly two years ago, pledging to ramp up renewables and curb planet-warming gases.
“We were the country that put pressure on them more than any other,” said the source familiar with the process.
But it’s a very different world now. As COP30 looms, China will not be facing that same pressure.
The Biden administration proffered an ambitious US target before leaving office, a cut of 61-66% below 2005 levels by 2035. This would have been tough even under a Democratic administration that favors clean energy. It’s vanishingly unlikely under the Trump administration with its “drill, baby, drill” mantra.
That leaves all eyes on China. Its target is by far the most consequential for the climate, experts told CNN.
The country has a well-established pattern of under-promising and over-delivering. Its most recent target gave the country until “around” 2030 to peak its climate pollution. Independent analysis shows it is likely this has already happened, five years ahead of schedule, and pollution is now starting to decline.
Biden administration officials had encouraged China to put forward a sharp pollution cut of 30% by 2035. But some experts anticipate a much more tepid target giving China plenty of wiggle room.
“Beijing has been sending signals that those demands are just too high, rather unrealistic and unfair in their view,” said Li Shuo, director of the China climate hub at the Asia Society Policy Institute. “It is very safe to say there will be a gap. And potentially that gap will be rather significant.”
Shuo and colleagues at the Asia Society believe China will put forward a high single-digit or a low double-digit figure for pollution cuts.
The number matters, said former US climate envoy Todd Stern. A strong, ambitious goal from China “would affect numbers all over the world and it would affect the perception of whether COP is making decent progress or not,” he added.
Even if its climate pledges lack ambition, China is still leagues ahead of the rest of the world when it comes to clean energy.
It is currently building 510 gigawatts of utility-scale solar and wind capacity, according to Global Energy Monitor. This will add to the eye-popping 1,400 gigawatts already online — five times what is operating in the US.
The big sticking point is coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel, to which China remains wedded. “They’re building every five years as much coal as remains in the US,” Duke said.
That’s the paradox of the US withdrawal, Singh said.
“It could advance China’s global climate leadership while simultaneously easing the pressure on Beijing to accelerate its difficult transition away from fossil fuels.”