As U.S. Retreats on Climate, China and Europe Pledge to Go Green Together
A joint statement promised new efforts to cut emissions at a time when China is positioning itself as the world’s one-stop shop for clean energy technologies.
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China installed more solar panels and wind turbines in 2024 than the rest of the world combined.Credit...Gilles Sabrié for The New York Times
By Somini Sengupta
July 24, 2025
Two of the world’s three big climate polluters, China and the European Union, pledged on Thursday to work together to slow down planetary heating. Together they called the Paris Agreement, the pact among nations to address global warming, “the cornerstone of international climate cooperation.”
They didn’t mention the United States by name, but they didn’t have to.
America, the third member of the trio of top global climate polluters, has said that it will pull out of the Paris Agreement, and the Trump administration has rolled back policies and government-funded programs that were intended to spur the development of renewable energy in the United States.
The joint statement opened by saying, “in the fluid and turbulent international situation today, it is crucial that all countries, notably the major economies, maintain policy continuity and stability and step up efforts to address climate change.”
China and the European Union most certainly don’t agree on everything when it comes to tackling rising emissions. European officials have in the past been vocal in criticizing China’s widespread use of coal: China burns more coal than any country ever has. European officials have also criticized what they call China’s dumping of inexpensive electric vehicles on the global market.
And China has criticized the European Union’s new border tax based on greenhouse-gas emissions, which makes it costlier to sell Chinese products there, particularly steel. Beijing and Brussels also have major differences on geopolitics, including the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
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But China has staked out an ambitious long-term policy of dominating the sale of clean-energy technologies to the world including solar panels, wind turbines, next-generation batteries and electric vehicles. What makes the joint pledge significant is that it represents an attempt to smooth the tensions over the trade of these products, particularly the export of Chinese EVs to Europe.
“In the absence of robust U.S. climate action, the EU and China still recognize the imperative of working together to confront a shared existential threat,” said Li Shuo, director of China Climate Hub at the Asia Society Policy Institute. “Amid deep divergences” in global climate policy, he said, the joint statement “offers a modest but meaningful source of relief.”
With years of generous state support for private companies, China is now the global front-runner in building and selling clean energy technologies.
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At home it installed more solar panels and wind turbines in 2024 than the rest of the world combined. Its electric vehicles are sold in showrooms from Milan to Mumbai, and it is setting up electric vehicle assembly plants around the world, including in Thailand, Turkey and Brazil. Some of China’s biggest clean-energy manufacturing plants are in Saudi Arabia, a petrostate.
An analysis published Thursday in Carbon Brief, an online publication, said China’s export of clean energy goods in 2024 alone are expected to reduce global emissions by 1 percent.
Making these clean-energy products in China is itself a polluting activity, in part because China’s factories are so reliant on coal power. Researchers estimated the emissions produced by factories making this gear for export in 2024 amount to 110 million tons of carbon dioxide. And China is continuing to build out coal plants.
Carbon dioxide is a major greenhouse gas warming the world. Released into the atmosphere, it acts as a blanket, trapping the sun’s heat.
The joint statement on Thursday included a promise by both China and the E.U. to submit new targets for reducing their greenhouse gas emissions before November, when the international climate negotiations known as COP are held in Brazil.
The European Commission, the bloc’s executive arm, has proposed, ambitiously, to cut its climate pollution by 90 percent by 2040, compared with 1990 levels. That target has yet to be approved by the European Parliament. China has yet to release an updated target.
It remains unclear if the United States will send representatives to the climate talks in Brazil.
The statement didn’t mention whether the new Chinese and European targets would be aligned with what scientific consensus says is necessary to avert some of the worst effects of climate change. That would require limiting the world’s temperature increase to to “well below” 2 degrees Celsius compared with preindustrial levels.
“The fact that a joint statement was agreed and published at this moment in time is significant,” Kaysie Brown, who follows climate diplomacy at E3G, a European research and advocacy group. “It provides a timely and much-needed signal of renewed climate leadership at a moment when global ambition is faltering.”
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Somini Sengupta is the international climate reporter on the Times climate team.
A version of this article appears in print on July 26, 2025, Section A, Page 6 of the New York edition with the headline: As U.S. Retreats on Climate, China and Europe Pledge to Go Green Together. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
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