THE DEBATE PAPERS October 2024 Should the United States, Australia and like-minded allies cooperate or compete with China when it comes to fighting climate change? Xuyang Dong and Noah Gordon Strategic competition between the United States and China has expanded into the realm of climate change and clean energy. [...] As part of the USSC The Debate Papers, the Centre invited Xuyang Dong, China energy policy analyst at Climate Energy Finance, and Noah Gordon, acting co-director of the Sustainability, Climate and Geopolitics program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, to discuss whether the United States, Australia and other like-minded allies and partners should cooperate or compete with China whe. [...] The scale of this The reality is that China holds a number of the keys production has dramatically decreased polysilicon to solve climate change, with regards to technolo- prices, down 43% in China since the beginning of gy, capital, strategy, and the scale of its manufac- the year, making solar the world’s cheapest clean turing capacity. [...] The Debate Papers 2 THE DEBATE PAPERS The world needs to better distribute and leverage Further, converting the overcapacity of China’s globally the climate and energy solutions provided cleantech exports, which the United States and by China’s R&D, innovation, manufacturing and others claim is ‘flooding the market,’ into rapid export of cleantech, especially in the developing deployment of energy. [...] But now that clean energy is And why was the United States finally able to pro- becoming a route to wealth and national power, vide serious government support for clean ener- we are increasingly seeing the benefits of compe- gy, in the form of the Inflation Reduction Act? The tition, even between rival powers like China on key vote in the Senate, Democrat Joe Manchin of the one hand and the United.
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Table of Contents
- Should the United States Australia and like-minded allies cooperate or compete with China when it comes to fighting climate change 1
- Countering the global existential threat of climate change requires more than cooperation between like-minded allies. It requires global collaboration. 2
- The world needs to better distribute and leverage globally the climate and energy solutions provided by Chinas RD innovation manufacturing and export of cleantech. 3
- Competition between rival powers is more beneficial for climate change mitigation than is generally realised. 4
- We cant pretend that we will solve the problem with competition alone because there are important measures that competition cannot catalyse namely those that dont make states directly richer or safer. 5