The following is an expanded version of a talk given by London-based climate activist Paul Atkin at the Socialist China Conference 2025 on the subject of China’s leadership role in fighting climate breakdown.
The piece argues that climate change is no longer a distant eventuality but a present-day crisis. Drawing on IPCC science, Paul stresses we are already on a dangerous trajectory and in a decisive decade. China is directly suffering climate impacts including flooding, drought, heat deaths and crop yield loss, and as such has a compelling reason to lead on mitigation and adaptation. 
China frames its approach to environmental protection through the lens of ecological civilisation and the Two Mountains proposition popularised by Xi Jinping – that green mountains with clear water are as valuable as mountains of gold and silver. China’s political system, Paul contends, allows a centralised, state-driven push for renewable energy and clean infrastructure at scales and speeds that the capitalist world cannot easily emulate.
The country is now a global powerhouse in solar, wind, batteries and electric vehicles, and as a result its domestic emissions may already have peaked. China’s solar and wind installation rates are staggering: “Last year China installed as much renewable power in one year as the US has in its entire history, and this will accelerate.”
Abandoning overseas coal investments, China is helping developing countries leapfrog fossil dependency via exports of solar panels and other clean energy hardware.In contrast, Trump “is locking the US into a suicidal entrenchment in increasingly outmoded fossil fuel technology”.
The article concludes that China is emerging as the de facto climate leader, charting an urgently-needed path of sustainable development. The choice for the rest of the world is whether to hitch itself to the US’s fossil-fuel wagon or align with a cleaner, renewable-based future enabled in large part by China’s commitment, investment and innovation.
This article first appeared on Paul Atkin’s blog, Urban Ramblings. Below the text we embed the video of the speech.
I edit the Greener Jobs Alliance Newsletter and convene the National Education Union Climate Change Network, but am speaking in a personal capacity because both organisations contain a range of views about China and its role in climate change. These are mine.
Marx used to quote Hegel’s dictum that “The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of dusk” to note that people by and large learn from events only after they have happened. In the case of the climate crisis, dusk is falling already and we know what is happening.
IPCC Reports are very clear about the increase in greenhouse gases, the increase in global temperatures that arise from that, and the impacts are increasingly documented, as well as reported as they happen. We are experiencing it. It’s not a single cataclysm that may or may not happen some time in the future. It is happening now. Slowly from the point of view of political/electoral cycles, but with terrifying rapidity in geological terms; such that we are in a crucial decade in the century that will make or break human civilization.
I’d add that from COP to COP the IPCC sets out possible scenarios for how the crisis will unfold. So far, we have been heading consistently along the “unlikely worst case scenario”.
I’d also add that most people see the unfolding of this crisis as following an almost Fabian path of inevitable gradualism, but, in physics as in politics, the tendency is to have a long period of apparent stasis, in which forces build until you hit a tipping point, and there are then sudden dramatic shifts that are unimaginable until they happen, but make the previous period unimaginable once they have.
As the joke used to go, “Whoops comrades, yet another unforeseen historical inevitability”.
The impact of the crisis on China itself is already severe (at 1.3C globally above pre industrial averages, but China already at 1.6C above).
- this July 2025 alone, the value of “direct economic losses” due to flooding, landslides, earthquakes and drought was equivalent to $7.3bn and “road damages” amounted to $2.2bn, according to the Ministry of Transport.
- The 30,000 deaths related to heatwaves in 2023 was almost double the average between 1986-2005.
- Droughts in 2024 hit more than 11 million people, more than 1.2m hectares of crops and the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences estimates that climate-related yield reductions could amount to 5% to 10% by 2030 – so, in five years – under current warming trends.
- One study estimates that key cereal crops could lose around 2.6% yield per degree Celsius of warming, with more vulnerable regions facing up to a 12.7% loss. Another study projected up to 37% yield decline within decades if warming continues unchecked.
Challenges
China’s response aims to build a moderately prosperous socialist society as an ecological civilisation. The connection between the two is expressed in the Two Mountains proposition popularised by Xi Jinping – that green mountains with clear water are as valuable as mountains of gold and silver. So, as China grows, it will grow greener. So it’s not Socialism with green bits, let alone a Kruschevite vision of the conquest of nature, but Green Socialism.
And the socialism is essential to the greenness. One Australian commentator put it in the grudging way that Western commentators who grasp the reality nevertheless can’t help but do
“The authoritarian regime put the heft of the state behind clean technologies at a scale and pace difficult to imagine in most democracies.”
What this means is that if you have socialist planning you can make strategic decisions for the common good that won’t be sabotaged by the vested interests that buy elections and control “western democracies”.
Or, as a Canadian commentator put it. “China is pushing power sector transformation through central planning. It can build clean infrastructure quickly”, as “China sees the old fossil fuel growth model as not sustainable and increasingly unable to sustain long-term prosperity.” To put that another way, if the socialism that’s built isn’t green, it won’t last.
But China’s colossal state driven investment in what it calls “the three news” – solar power – electric vehicles and batteries – along with wind power- is leading to a global tipping point as the cost of renewable energy is now cheaper than that generated by any fossil fuel – and set to become even more so. And this is having an impact on countries in the rest of the world that are far from being socialist.
Last year, crude oil imports to China fell for the first time in two decades, with the exception of the pandemic. The International Energy Agency expects China to hit peak oil in 2027.
As China had driven two-thirds of the growth in global oil demand in the decade to 2023, global demand set to plateau then drop before 2030. This makes continued investment in fossil fuel exploration, or power plants, increasingly risky. Banks that have traditionally put huge resources into FF investments are beginning to get cold feet, even as they row back on explicit green commitments. This is, paradoxically, putting the US Fossil Fuel drive at odds with markets.
This is because the sheer scale of China’s investment is mind boggling and this is increasingly the core driver of China’ economy; which in turn is having a global knock on effect.
- With just 17.2% of the world’s people, China has half of the world’s solar, half of the world’s wind power and half of the world’s electric cars.
- Of every four” offshore wind turbines installed globally in 2025, 3 of them will be in China.
- In April this year, China installed more solar power than Australia has in all its history 45.2GW. In one month – at a rate equivalent to a power station every 8 minutes.
- Last year China installed as much renewable power in one year as the US has in its entire history, and this will accelerate.
- They are building enormous solar and wind farms in arid parts of the Western interior. To give an idea of the scale of these things, they are two thirds of the way through building a solar farm in Tibet that is the size of Chicago. (Projects like this all over arid areas are also having a positive impact on holding back desertification and boosting agriculture, as condensation from the panels feeds grasses which can be grazed by sheep).
As a result China’s domestic emissions are peaking, even as demand for energy increases. In fact energy prices went down in the summer even as demand for a/c boomed during heatwaves. Emissions were down 1.6% in the first half of this year. That’s vital because China’s emissions are 30% of the global total. If China gets this wrong, we’re in real trouble.
China now has 57% of its energy generated by renewables, compared to just over 50% for the UK.
Coal power is still massive in China, and its rise to prosperity came through climbing up a mountain of it.
However, coal is now explicitly being defined as back up to a grid structured around renewables and there is now significant overcapacity – leading to these plants only operating around 50% of the time. Coal consumption dropped by 2.6% in the first half of this year, even as the economy grew by 5%, showing that the shift in reliance is picking up pace.
A question that this poses as quite an urgent matter is planning for transition in heavy coal dependent provinces like Shanxi, which is 75% dependent on coal mining and coal derivative industries. If the transition is as fast as it might be, this could pose a serious problem locally unless alternative industries are planned and built in as part of the process. I’d be interested in any debate going on in China about how that will be addressed.
Global impact
All this is feeding through globally and this is crucial. Taken individually, there are a number of European countries, like Finland, that have made a faster shift away from fossil fuels and have a higher per capita investment, but you’d expect wealthier countries to be able to do that. The stunning thing is not that some have, but that most haven’t. And none of them are having the global impact that China is.
Though there are a few residual projects, China’s decision to abandon coal investment overseas has been a pivotal decision.
More than 60% of emerging and developing economies are leapfrogging the US and Europe in clean electrification thanks More than 60% of emerging and developing economies are leapfrogging the US and Europe in clean electrification thanks mostly to China’s exports of cheap solar panels.
- Pakistan last year added as much capacity in rooftop solar as they’d previously been able to generate from their entire grid.
- This is now being picked up in parts of Africa, with solar panel exports from China up 60% this year. This is from a low base, but the potential is enormous. In countries like Kenya, Morocco, Algeria, Ethiopia, the DRC, Botswana, Zambia Nigeria and South Africa solar imports have grown by factors of between 3 to 8. The liberating potential of no longer being dependent on imported fossil fuels, the capacity to install micro grids and distributed power to widespread rural communities could provide the same technological leapfrog as when SATphones (mobiles) made landline technology redundant in Africa. Abundant, cheap solar electricity also allows the continent to be slung together with a High Speed Rail network, not dependent on medium range flights burning kerosene.
- Outside Africa, in countries like Brazil and Vietnam, the adoption of solar, wind and battery storage is outpacing not only fossil fuels, but also the business-as-usual strategies of many rich economies, let alone the delirious reactionary stance of the USA.
China’s clean energy exports in 2024 alone shaved 1 per cent off global emissions outside of China, according to Carbon Brief, and this will accelerate during the next 30 years.
Reuters reports that 87% of power generation investment in emerging economies and China flowed into clean energy in 2024; and as China is the pivot nation in the global system, three-quarters of global fossil demand is now in nations that have already peaked.
Three factors underlie this. And these are quotes from Reuters, so not from a source the right wing press here would call “eco fanatic”.
Physics: Fossil fuels are wasteful: two-thirds of the energy in coal, oil or gas is lost to heat or inefficiency. Solar, electric motors, and heat pumps are two to four times as efficient. We can do more with less energy at far lower cost. That is expressed very well in this graphic.
- Economics: Fossil fuels are commodities built on extraction: as reserves deplete, it gets more expensive to access what’s left. Look at the North Sea. Electro-based technology is manufactured: so the more that gets built, the cheaper and better it becomes. On average, costs fall by around 20% every time deployment doubles. In most of the world, solar and wind are now the lowest-cost new power. Investment follows – today, two-thirds of global energy capital flows into “electrotech”, while oil majors are investing more in stock buybacks than in new wells.
- Geopolitics: The old energy system left three-quarters of humanity dependent on expensive, imported fuels. Electro-based technologies unlock local resources. Almost all countries have enough sun and wind to meet their energy needs many times over. In fact, emerging and developing economies hold 70% of the world’s solar and wind resources and 50% of the critical minerals for the energy transition.
What this means is that the Western model of development is not needed for the majority of the world. Thanks to China’s investments in renewables, they can modernise in their own way – and that means that the future does not, and cannot, look like the USA.
So, to elaborate on the last point, China is leading on climate because it is not doing what the US is doing, nor following it in a race to the bottom
Ma Zhaoxu ,China’s vice-foreign minister says, “regardless of how the international situation evolves, China’s proactive actions to address climate change will not slow down”.
The Trump administration, as we know, is locking the US into a suicidal entrenchment in increasingly outmoded FF technology. “Drill baby drill”.
In rolling back Biden’s attempt to suck green investment into the US, Trump has, as many commentators have noted, abandoned the future. This doesn’t simply involve domestic economic self sabotage, with more expensive FF plants kept running and pushing up bills, offshore wind farms cancelled imperilling supply in regions like New England, but also a completely reckless wrecking ball taken to disaster emergency relief and any state scientific or academic research related to the climate and the impacts of it – setting up a vetting committee to make sure that published papers don’t challenge the administration’s line (so US academics at international conferences have taken to using burner phones).
That means that US policy is based on a set of lies about climate change, and actively has to suppress the truth about it. Ultimately, a policy based on lies comes back to bite you.
The US is now the world’s leading petro state. And part of Trump’s trade offensive has been to get the US’s subordinate allies to buy its exports of LNG – whether they need it or not.
Some of this involves fantasy figures. The EU deal to buy $750 billion worth of US LNG exceeds the capacity of the industry to produce it, tanker fleet to transport it and European LNG terminals to process it (and the EU can’t mandate member states to buy it anyway). The US/UK nuclear deal is similarly fanciful. They are aiming beyond the capacity of their own system.
But the purpose of it is to lock as much of the world as possible into FF bondage. They actually have a Department of Energy Dominance. And it’s why the increasingly shrill arguments coming from the most overt political subordinates of the US – Reform here, with the incredible shrinking Conservative Party yapping along in their wake, with an increasingly panicky right wing press in full sneering support – are actually aiming at consolidating UK energy dependence on the US, no matter how ruinous the cost.
Which is why they have to invert the truth and argue that getting to sustainability is too costly. The OBR reckons it will cost 19p a day per person up to 2050, a cost already eclipsed by just the food price rises from two bad harvests in the last two years. But, having to buy US LNG instead of using the sun and wind will impoverish us and risk the future.
This sets up a politics and diplomacy of volatile delirium based on wishful thinking backed up with open and extreme violence. The renaming of the Dept of Defence at the Dept of War shows how they have taken the mask off now.
Given the factors outlined above, a success for the US would lock the world, and the US itself, into climate collapse. The sort of scenario outlined by one of their own think tanks in 2008 as a situation in which “countries with resources would have to engage in nightmarish episodes of triage. Deciding who, and what, can be salvaged from a disordered environment. The choices would primarily have to be made among the poor, at home and abroad”.
Something it’s in all of our interests to avoid.
But, while the US still makes some of the weather – literally in this case – it’s no longer able to determine the direction of the world and, in my view, Trump is increasingly looking like the Emperor Diocletian, who restored the old pagan rites for the last time when their time had already gone. He is standing on thin ice, that’s getting thinner as the ice caps melt. As Bill McKibbon puts it in his optimistic article “Here comes the Sun”; “Big Oil spent more money on last year’s election cycle in my country than they’ve ever done before. And it’s why they’re now being rewarded with a whole variety of measures designed to slow this transition down, which may succeed. I mean, it’s possible that 20 years from now, America will be a kind of museum of internal combustion that other people will visit to see what the olden days were like.
But it’s not going to slow the rest of the world down much, I don’t think.”
There is obviously a tension now in the UK government, with its attempt to dodge tariffs by bending the knee and crippling any possibility of positive investment by committing to an annual £77 billion black hole in “defence” spending, and the stated direction of the Department of Energy Security and Net Zero to make the UK an “electrostate”, which involves some cooperation with China, but would require more investment than the military spend will allow. US pressure has already excluded Huawei from 5G telecoms, and from the nuclear programme (which will make it unaffordable as well as useless).
As this crisis unfolds and deepens, the cost of being shackled to the US and the cold war stance it requires against China will become more and more apparent. And a more live debate in the climate movement. And something we need to inject into “mainstream politics” in and through the unions, Labour, the Greens and Your Party.
