Michael Doran and Brenda Shaffer collaborated on the Tablet column “China’s Net Zero Advantage.” Doran is a senior fellow with the Hudson Institute. Shaffer is with the Naval Postgraduate Academy. This is the opening section of their column:
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In its competition with China, the United States holds a natural advantage: abundant oil and cheap natural gas. Reliable energy powers factories, data centers, transportation networks, and military operations. It lets the United States combine technological innovation with industrial scale, an advantage that China, dependent on imported oil and gas, cannot easily reproduce.
But China has found a partial answer: the Net Zero movement. For years, a large, influential, and well-funded Western network has campaigned to restrict the production and use of fossil fuels. Many of the same campaigning organizations also oppose nuclear power, the largest source of emissions-free electricity in the United States. Climate advocates seek to persuade the American government to surrender its energy advantage voluntarily. Beijing agrees.
Over the past two decades, therefore, an alliance in all but name has taken shape. On one side stands the Chinese party-state. On the other stands a Western climate community much broader than its activist core: environmental organizations and the philanthropies that finance them, research institutes and international agencies, journalists who cover the transition to renewable energy, officials drawn from the movement’s own ranks, and the investors, asset managers, and financial institutions whose returns depend on the policies the movement secures.
The Net Zero community is not uniform. Its radical wing seeks to end capitalism and usher in a new socialist experiment. Its wealthiest participants intend to profit from the transition to wind and solar. What binds them is not a pact or a chain of command but a convergence of interests. Many, if not most, of them would deny that the alliance with China exists at all.
On the surface, it looks like a relationship of strange bedfellows. China is the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases and the largest producer and consumer of coal. Its power system still runs mainly on coal, and it burns more coal than the rest of the world combined. By the climate movement’s own stated goal, the reduction of emissions, China should be its principal target. It is not. The organizations working to avert climate change aim their strongest instruments—divestment, litigation, regulatory pressure, public shaming—at Western energy and industry, and at the governments that decline to restrict them.
Of China, they speak in an entirely different register. The respect accorded to Beijing by Christiana Figueres, who ran the U.N. climate secretariat and midwifed the Paris Agreement, is instructive. In November 2025 she said that in three decades of climate diplomacy, the Chinese had “always under-promised and over-delivered,” a habit she attributed to integrity and humility. John Kerry, then the United States climate envoy and the movement’s most senior American official, put the matter more starkly. At the Glasgow climate conference in November 2021, on the day Washington announced a cooperation agreement with Beijing, Kerry was asked about the forced labor of Uyghurs in Xinjiang, where most of the world’s solar-grade polysilicon is produced. The subject, he said, was “not my lane.” His job was to move the climate agenda forward.
Figueres credits Beijing with integrity. Kerry declines to look at what Beijing does. Neither is an outlier. Between the diplomat who built the climate regime and the envoy who bargained with the world’s largest emitter lies the settled disposition of the Net Zero movement: Contrary to all available emissions evidence, China is the morally serious party, and the West is the laggard. Why?
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2026/09/quote-of-the-day-132.php
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