China Has No Intention of Helping US in Climate Change Initiatives: Expert

U.S. Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry (R) is seen on a screen with Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi (L) during a meeting via video link on Sept. 1, 2021. U.S. Department of State/Handout via Reuters

As the United States is ramping up talks with China over climate issues, Kelly Sloan, senior fellow in energy and environment at Centennial Institute, has said that China has no intention of helping the West in this regard.

During last year’s World Economic Forum in Davos, U.S. climate envoy John Kerry told The Associated Press that the United States was making progress with China on climate issues.

“We are going to work on the practicalities of how we move faster [to lower emissions],” he said. “Maybe we can help with technology of some kind to help China move faster. Maybe China could help us better understand some things we could do better.”

In an April 2021 interview with Foreign Policy magazine, Kerry said that the United States needs China in the fight against climate change.

“I don’t think that the PRC’s ambitions are really geared towards solving climate change or helping the West solve climate change. Their ambitions are to aggrandize the People’s Republic of China,” Sloan told “China in Focus” on NTD, The Epoch Times’ sister media outlet.

“I think that it would be wise for the West to embrace technologies that don’t rely on China, such as nuclear. And unfortunately, that’s still a political question, not an economic or environmental question,” he added.

Economic Weapon

The expert further raised concern that America doesn’t have “a foreign policy strong enough to be able to counter any potential strategic implications to sourced materials, particularly from a global competitor and potential adversaries such as China.”

Between 2010 and 2020, China’s share of global polysilicon production increased from 26 percent to 82 percent, according to a 2021 report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

With plans rolling out pushing for a green revolution, the demand for materials to produce electric vehicle batteries—such as lithium and cobalt—is expected to surge.

Sloan sounded the alarm that China could try to corner the market and use it “as sort of an economic weapon against the United States.”

Sloan singled out the agreement between Ford Motor Company and the China-based Contemporary Amperex Technology Co. Limited (CATL) to supply batteries for Ford’s electric vehicles.

The deal would qualify CATL to receive lucrative production tax benefits under the new Inflation Reduction Act, according to a Bloomberg report. The report said that would be made possible through a deal making Ford 100 percent the owner of the plant, while CATL would own the technology and operate the facility.

“Should we be entering into agreements with potential geopolitical adversaries, especially one that presents the human rights abuses and a threat to peace in [the] Western Pacific vis-a-vis Taiwan, that the People’s Republic of China does?” he questioned.

Prioritize Nuclear

The expert saw storage as the primary obstacle when it comes to renewables such as solar and wind.

“It’s almost cliché now to say you can only collect them when winds are blowing, or the sun’s shining so that energy has to be stored,” he said, adding, “We need to figure out how to store that energy, we’re not very good at that.”

Sloan pointed out that with coal and fossil fuel, the operators can adjust their outputs based on market needs.

“You can make those fluctuations and meet those fluctuations in demand that happen on an almost constant basis. You can’t do that with renewables,” he said.

Another imminent problem, he said, is “how to meet demand, especially as we’re increasing demand.”

The transmission of these energies is also a big issue, according to Sloan.

“You can ship or pipe natural gas from where it’s harvested to wherever you need to make the electricity. You can’t really do that with solar and wind. That electricity is generated on-site,” Sloan said.

The expert said that America needs a domestic energy policy that prioritizes nuclear power, which can make the United States less dependent on China.

“I think we need a foreign energy policy that prioritizes our relations with our allies, and takes a very realistic strategic look at how things are shaping up internationally, and how our decisions are going to impact that whether it’s in terms of our relations with China or Russia, or how we’re going to support potential allies, such as Europe or Taiwan,” Sloan said.

Terri Wu contributed to this report.