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A curious thing happened at the start of this Congress. Despite the many predictions of hyper-partisanship under the new Republican House majority, two early roll call votes this January passed with big bipartisan majorities. It should not go without notice that both votes are related to China.
The first created a new Select Committee on the Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party. The second was on a bill to ban oil sales from the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve to China. It is clear that there is bipartisan support for countering China. And it is precisely these two themes — competition and energy — that make me optimistic that a bipartisan linking of climate and trade policy this Congress is possible.
While Democrats in the last Congress passed a suite of climate policies in the Inflation Reduction Act to accelerate decarbonization in the U.S., the bill doesn’t incentivize the rest of the world to follow suit. The U.S. alone, emitting 11 percent of global emissions, cannot stop the worst of global warming while China accounts for 27 percent. But what can we do about that? China doesn’t seem keen on voluntarily decarbonizing.
The simplest way for us to incentivize China to decarbonize is through trade policies, preferably in conjunction with a “carbon club” of like-minded countries working in tandem.
