Nov. 13, 2025, 4:15 p.m. ET
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London
More than 40,000 delegates from nearly 200 countries are getting down to work this week in the Brazilian city of Belém, on the edge of the Amazon rainforest, for what is looking like an increasingly forlorn task: to slow and mitigate the overheating of our planet.
But while their work at the 2025 United Nations Climate Change Conference, commonly known as COP30, certainly matters, this latest gathering comes amid a dramatic shift – along with an improbable glimmer of hope – in the politics of climate change.
Whether, and how, the world adopts clean energy technologies – replacing carbon-heavy oil, gas, and coal – has come to depend less on these annual get-togethers than on the domestic political agendas of each individual nation.
As the COP30 climate conference gathers in Brazil, Beijing and Washington have taken opposing positions on climate change. Donald Trump calls it a “con.” Xi Jinping has invested billions this year on green tech. Whose view will prove more prescient?
And no nations matter more than two energy superpowers with diverging interests, and with increasingly divergent approaches to climate change: the United States and China.
U.S. President Donald Trump recently branded climate change “the greatest con job ever.” He has been scaling back former President Joe Biden’s green-energy subsidies, doubling down on America’s world-leading production of oil and gas, and he is ignoring the Belém conference.
Chinese leader Xi Jinping is making a very different economic bet.
And that is the source of the “improbable glimmer of hope” among some delegates in Brazil.
For while China remains by far the world’s largest emitter of the fossil-fuel gases driving global warming, Mr. Xi’s government has been investing hundreds of billions of dollars in solar and wind energy, storage batteries, and electric vehicles.
That technology is not just for domestic use, though it is already having an effect on emissions in China.
It is also for export, to generate the trade revenue on which China’s economy depends.
Crucially, that has begun giving less-developed countries in the so-called Global South something almost unimaginable a few years ago: a realistic path toward growth that need not rely principally on carbon-emitting fuels.
Pakistan has begun importing large numbers of solar-energy panels. Nearly three-quarters of car buyers in Nepal now choose Chinese electric vehicles. Ethiopia has banned the import of gas-powered cars altogether.
Brazil has moved to persuade China’s giant e-vehicle manufacturers to set up production there.