Is a Climate-Centered Foreign Policy Even Possible?

Curated by Peter Friedland, 4/21/21, from Time Magazine’s newly revised newsletter ‘Climate Is Everything”

BY JUSTIN WORLAND Senior Correspondent, Dear readers, When climate change first entered the global consciousness 30 years ago, many envisioned a kumbaya moment in the future, when diverse nations would put aside their differences and come together to solve history’s trickiest collective action problem. Even as recently as six years ago, when the Paris Agreement was negotiated, leaders saw the path forward as one where countries all voluntarily worked in the same direction. The reality, it turns out, will be much more complicated—every country, after all, continues to do what it believes is best for its own citizens first. What we’re seeing now is the climatization of foreign policy and international affairs; in the words of Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Monday, the U.S. is putting “the climate crisis at the center of our foreign policy and national security.” In this week’s newsletter, which comes just a couple days ahead of Biden’s virtual climate summit convening some 40 heads of government from around the world, I’m looking at the challenges the administration faces by fully incorporating climate change into foreign policy. The big question: how does the administration address areas where there are competing interests?This point is perhaps most at issue when it comes to the U.S. relationship with China. In the Obama years, diplomats used climate change as an olive branch to help bridge divides between the two countries, softening tensions in other areas. But the situation has evolved dramatically since then with the trade war that unfolded during the Trump presidency, COVID-19 and new knowledge of egregious human rights abuses. The Biden Administration has from the beginning insisted that it won’t budge on these issues in exchange for cooperation on climate change. On Monday, without naming China, Blinken said progress on climate won’t be a “chip they can use to excuse bad behavior in other areas.”Other countries—Mexico and Saudi Arabia, to name a couple—present similar challenges. The U.S. has strategic relationships to protect, but neither country’s current leadership has been inclined to make much progress on climate change, largely because they both have massive oil reserves. To live up to the promise climate envoy John Kerry described to me last month as keeping climate “constantly at the table,” the administration will need to figure out a path to extract concessions on climate without giving up much in other areas—a tricky dynamic given the range of thorny issues the U.S. needs to manage with both countries at the moment.There’s even potential conflict on the horizon with the most obvious allies. The European Union has launched an effort to create a border carbon tax that would charge imports on high-carbon products from places that aren’t addressing climate change up to its standard. The details are yet to be determined, but Kerry has already expressed “concern” about the policy, which depending on how it’s structured, could hurt the U.S.’s trade stature.But in some cases, competing interests may actually be a good thing. The U.S., the EU and China all competing to become home to the world’s electric vehicle industry, for example, will aid domestic industries as well as the broader climate fight. “It’s difficult to imagine the United States winning the long-term strategic competition with China if we cannot lead the renewable energy revolution,” Blinken said Monday. Indeed, maybe tackling the climate challenge requires less kumbaya and more hard-nosed strategic competition.

A PROGRAMMING NOTEThis is the first edition of TIME’s relaunched climate newsletter, with a few changes that we hope make for a better reading experience for all of our subscribers. The most obvious is that we’ve changed the name of the newsletter to “Climate Is Everything.” It’s a phrase we’ve used at TIME to talk about how climate is shaping everything from policy decisions to the cars we drive, whether you’re in Beijing or Brussels, especially as we emerge from the pandemic and look ahead to what will drive society in the years ahead. It’s also the framework for our first climate special issue of 2021—which explores the ways the climate crisis is shaping where we live, how we work, what we study, the stories we tell. And, of course, it’s the framework for our climate newsletter going forward.