Chow Mean? China's new COP29 trade wrinkle sets stage for conflict with Trump

Facebook Tweet LinkedIn

A dismal outlook for next week’s COP29 climate summit in Azerbaijan grew even more precarious this week after Donald Trump was re-elected as U.S. president. And adding to the gloom and doom is that China said it wanted to use the talks to air trade grievances.

The United Nations Conference of the Parties (COP29) has never before been used to discuss trade disputes, mostly focusing on agreements to cut harmful greenhouse gas emissions and ideas for wealthier countries to help poorer countries fund their renewable energy transitions.

China’s demand, which was joined by India, Brazil and South Africa (known as the BASIC group), comes as tensions mount regarding global trade now that Trump is president-elect and as several European trade regulations begin to take force. Those include a carbon border levy on products imported from emissions-heavy countries and a deforestation protection.

By turning the talks into a forum for trade disputes, China and the others threaten to blow up the summit even before it starts. But they also will attract Trump’s attention, and perhaps lure him to future summits if trade deals are indeed being made. Trump is widely expected to take the U.S. out of the Paris Agreement for a second time when he takes over in January, and not to be much of a force at future climate summits.

The move is a clear example that China’s plan to rebuild its struggling economy is in part based on a strategy of becoming the world’s leading clean energy and clean energy products exporter. By trying to attach disputes over its entry to other countries to climate talks, it adds a new challenge to the UN’s ambitions to decarbonize the world.

And sets up what could be one of the early confrontations with the new U.S. president.

(David Callaway is founder and Editor-in-Chief of Callaway Climate Insights. He is the former president of the World Editors Forum, Editor-in-Chief of USA Today and MarketWatch, and CEO of TheStreet Inc. His climate columns have appeared in USA Today, The Independent, and New Thinking magazine).