Jack Richardson is an Associate Fellow of the Council of Geostrategy.
The invasion of Ukraine will go down in history as the moment when geopolitics reasserted itself as the primary driver of international relations.
Some argue that the world of COP26, multilateralism, and climate diplomacy have been swept away; we must avoid applying such 20th-century thinking to the 21st Century.
The Government should call out those who manipulate climate diplomacy to further their own gains, but also capitalise on the advantages genuine climate leadership can provide in a more competitive world.
There are clear, state-based threats to British national security interests – a revanchist Russia, a rising China, and rogue states like Iran and North Korea. These types of threats are not new, but what complicates matters is a warming planet, which acts as a risk multiplier.
A food crisis looms as the Russian Navy blockades the Black Sea, preventing wheat from leaving Ukraine. But a heat wave in India has likewise reduced crop yields and forced Narendra Modi to backtrack on his offer to boost wheat exports to ease inflation in global prices.
Any historian can tell you of the dangers that arise when food becomes unaffordable.
Due to the global nature of climate change and nature loss, diplomatic efforts to tackle them are ‘shielded’ from negotiations on other foreign policy issues for the sake of cooperation on this global threat.
China is the classic example. While British ministers are bold in their criticism of human rights abuses in Xinjiang, and Parliament went further in declaring genocide, environmental diplomacy is somehow kept in a seperate box under a mantra that ‘global problems require global solutions’. This is not sustainable.
It is impossible to have a discussion about climate policy in the UK without hearing the following argument:
“We are investing all this money into researching new technologies, and encouraging people to switch to electric cars and heat pumps, yet we contribute under one per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions. Meanwhile, China alone makes up almost 30 per cent. Why on earth should we bother?”
It is a perfectly legitimate question to ask, which the Council on Geostrategy examines in its new primer on addressing the tensions caused by China’s carbon-intensive rise.
There is no doubt that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) will exploit the strategic opportunities the global energy transition may represent for China. Most obvious is that its status as a so-called developing country provides a justification for it to ‘free-ride’, benefitting from the actions of others while doing little itself.
Worse, China even has a record of actively undermining climate diplomacy and then stirring anger among developing countries over the failures of the developed world to take the problem seriously.
This strategy is easy for China to pursue under the ‘common but differentiated responsibilities’ (CBDR) principle, which is enshrined in international law: that developed countries have a responsibility to lead the way while others develop and focus more on other pressing issues.
As long as China retains its developing country status, it has an excuse to go slow on climate. It used this excuse several times in the run-up and during COP26 last year, despite China being by far the largest contributor to global warming today.
The Government should work with friends and other developing countries most at risk from climate change to challenge this abuse of the CBDR principle, which itself is a necessary and justified precursor to climate diplomacy.
It should simultaneously develop other routes to spur global emissions cuts, for example by replicating our energy transition partnership with South Africa with other countries of strategic interest (like Malaysia or Egypt), and promoting ‘clean free trade’ to diversify global supply chains and cut the costs of technology.
At home, the Government should be clearer on why net zero and the clean energy transition is advantageous for the UK. Capitalism and progress always bring disruption and any negative impact or costs incurred by the clean energy transition must be mitigated, but there are clear and tangible benefits.
The obvious one is that during a cost of living crisis caused by volatile oil and gas markets, the only realistic and economic way forward is more cheap, home-grown clean energy and a radical redesign of our energy system so that energy bills don’t simply reflect the price of natural gas.
Another is that, as Michael Gove recently said, “the world will come to us” if we continue to invest and promote net zero technologies in this country.
The UK has a habit of leading on research and innovation, but not on the commercialisation of technologies, meaning we import them later without as much domestic supply chain growth. We saw it with offshore wind.
Through reindustrialisation, we can seek shares of markets which are set to rapidly grow such as clean hydrogen, carbon capture and storage, or floating offshore wind, as the world seeks to cut carbon.
We must reduce pollution in a way that makes sense for our economy, while helping others to do the same. But we must not allow others to use climate diplomacy as a vehicle to undermine our national, and ultimately the planet’s, interests.
The Government should expose climate free-riding on the world stage and merge our climate objectives with our other foreign and domestic policy priorities.