Can China Replace an Absent America in the Climate Fight?

So why does China stay in? And could it step up, even, now that the United States has abdicated global leadership on reducing carbon emissions?

When U.S. President Donald Trump decided in 2025 to withdraw, again, from the Paris Agreement on climate change, it was not a surprise to anyone. What’s more surprising is China’s decision to stay in when it has every excuse to walk away. After all, the United States is the largest historical emitter of greenhouse gases and remains the second-largest emitter today after China. In the alternate history in which China had withdrawn, members of Congress would certainly have called for the United States to do the same.

When U.S. President Donald Trump decided in 2025 to withdraw, again, from the Paris Agreement on climate change, it was not a surprise to anyone. What’s more surprising is China’s decision to stay in when it has every excuse to walk away. After all, the United States is the largest historical emitter of greenhouse gases and remains the second-largest emitter today after China. In the alternate history in which China had withdrawn, members of Congress would certainly have called for the United States to do the same.

So why does China stay in? And could it step up, even, now that the United States has abdicated global leadership on reducing carbon emissions?

The first reason China stays in the Paris Agreement is because its leaders take the facts at face value. Debates about the science of climate change, and specifically whether greenhouses gases are causing it, never took hold among a Communist Party leadership teeming with scientists and engineers. From at least the 1990s, when I first interviewed officials there, the Chinese government took the risks of climate change seriously and, in particular, the threats resulting from major floods, extreme heat, and sea-level rise in China’s low-lying and economically critical Pearl River Delta region.

Over the same period in the United States, debates raged—more in the popular press and political circles than in scientific journals—about whether greenhouse gases actually trapped heat, whether the global average temperature was rising, and whether the ever more apparent impacts were attributable to the use of fossil fuels and the release of certain chemicals versus natural phenomena such as sunspots.

Once these debates were overwhelmed by the irrefutable connection between the inexorable growth of heat-trapping greenhouse gases and rising temperatures, sea-level rise, and more frequent incidents of extreme weather, the discourse in the United States shifted again. This time, it became about the economic costs of mitigating climate change, rather than the costs of climate change itself, which have piled up.

In 2024, the last year data was collected by the U.S. government, there were 27 weather- and climate-related disaster events in the United States with losses exceeding $1 billion, for a total of $183 billion in damages that year alone.