In Manhattan’s Union Square, mounted on a building home to a Best Buy and $8,000-a-month one-bedroom apartments, is a public art installation known as the Climate Clock. Between flashes of “Stop Fossil Fuels” and “Protect Earth,” the clock counts down—to the second—until the world is committed irreversibly to 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming. When the clock was first unveiled in September 2020, the world had about seven years and 100-odd days to act. When I visited this February, the countdown stood at three years and 156 days.

Yet even before the clock reaches zero, it has already become something of a relic. Even beyond the Republican-led assault on climate—part of the broader ideological war on environmental, social, and governance standards and “woke capitalism”—the past few years have seen a stunning retreat from target-based climate goals as climate elites have walked back their previously hawkish positions. Bill Gates, for whom climate change has long been a signature issue, published a memo last October in the lead-up to the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Brazil, or COP30, criticizing the “doomsday outlook” of the climate community.

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, who as governor of the Bank of England described climate change as a “defining issue for financial stability” and who in 2021 championed a series of landmark net-zero financial agreements during COP26 in Scotland, is now aggressively fast-tracking permits for liquefied natural gas export terminals. The same banks that once promised to no longer provide financing for new coal projects or drilling in the Arctic in the name of supporting net-zero goals have recently begun issuing forecasts about the business opportunities that 3 degrees of warming could bring.

Even the European Union—long the world’s self-styled leader on climate—has recently retreated from its most ambitious policies, abandoning a planned ban on new internal combustion engine vehicles and watering down its emissions reductions targets in the name of maintaining economic competitiveness. The consensus that long informed climate politics is fracturing: Whether because of political backlash, economic concerns, or elite resignation, a climate politics organized around global temperature targets appears increasingly unviable.

In the meantime, China has surged ahead in the clean energy sector, acting unilaterally to become the solar panel, lithium-ion battery, and electric vehicle supplier to the world. While China’s emissions reductions have fallen short of its own targets, there is no denying that it has cornered the market to become the world’s first clean energy superpower. It is a remarkable change in political tides for those who once believed the Western-designed framework of target-based international climate treaties would save the planet. It’s worth asking what, precisely, this framework was and what it got so wrong.

---

When climate change first appeared on the international agenda in the late 1980s, it was framed as a problem with a self-evident solution. Coming on the heels of the successful U.N.-led negotiations to phase out ozone-depleting chemicals known as CFCs, climate change seemed poised to mark another triumph for a distinct genre of international environmental diplomacy: Western-led, science-based, and oriented toward preventing environmental problems rather than reacting to them once they occurred.

The extent to which the ozone treaty, known as the Montreal Protocol, informed climate politics cannot be overstated. Like climate change, ozone depletion was a problem identified by the scientific community as a looming threat rather than an already unfolding environmental crisis; like climate, it was a collective action problem that required buy-in from the entire international community to be solved (even though it was a problem overwhelmingly caused by industrialized countries). Many of the diplomats, negotiators, U.N. officials, and NGOs involved in climate change had first cut their teeth on the ozone issue.

Expectations were thus high that climate would be solved using the ozone model: establish a scientific consensus about the nature of the threat, cultivate international political concern, and then negotiate a treaty organized around binding targets and timetables that included carve-outs for the developing world. The crucial distinctions between ozone and climate—such as the fact that ozone depletion was caused by a single class of chemicals rather than industrial society as a whole and that, in the case of ozone, chemical substitutes were quickly identified that made it lucrative for industry leaders, such as U.S. giant DuPont, to get behind calls for a CFC phaseout—were typically downplayed in the name of cultivating a sense of hope and possibility.

Climate change’s framing as a collective action problem meant that there was remarkably little by way of meaningful debate about competing political visions for responding to it. Instead, Western elites assumed that the tools for preventing climate change would come from within the prevailing international economic order.

And so, for the first two decades or so of climate politics, the global north’s strategies for mitigating climate change consisted almost entirely of international cap-and-trade emissions markets and carbon offset credit schemes—quintessentially apolitical mechanisms designed to gently ease the world into a lower-carbon future without disrupting the industrial economy. By the 2010s, they were also proving largely impotent. The Kyoto Protocol, in which industrialized nations committed to binding emissions targets and timetables, was adopted in 1997—although, crucially, the United States refused to ratify the treaty because of its insistence on preserving economic sovereignty.

It was an early indication that technocratic governance would prove limited when it came to addressing climate. The EU duly forged on, launching the world’s first carbon market in 2005, but overall, the world barely made a dent in emissions. By 2015, global average carbon dioxide concentrations reached a record high of 399.4 parts per million.

---

2015 was also the year that the Paris Agreement was signed. After years of climate gridlock—the nadir coming in 2009, when the COP talks in Copenhagen collapsed—Paris was hailed as a historic breakthrough, a sign that collective action on climate remained possible.

Signed by 195 countries, the treaty attempted to remedy some of the political failures of Kyoto—swapping out binding country pledges in favor of voluntary ones—while adopting an ambitious goal of restricting global average temperature rise to below 2 degrees. The treaty was widely acknowledged as most likely inadequate. But, in theory, the international community had signaled its willingness to transcend conventional geopolitics in the name of a common goal of protecting the climate.

In one sense, climate politics after Paris seemed to expand and intensify, as scientific studies were published that portrayed climate change mitigation as, at once, increasingly urgent and increasingly out of reach. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 2018 Special Report on 1.5 degrees of warming—which found that, given emission rates at the time, the world was on track to reach 1.5 degrees between 2030 and 2052—was widely interpreted to mean that humanity had a 12-year, Climate Clock-style “deadline” to prevent catastrophic global warming. The report sparked a new wave of mass climate activism, with Greta Thunberg’s Fridays for Future school strikes and Extinction Rebellion both launching that year.

But, in another sense, this period was merely an acceleration of the same technocratic regime. While successful in mobilizing millions of people around the world, these activist movements were fundamentally concerned with infusing the target-based climate framework with a sense of urgency and momentum. (Flags at Extinction Rebellion protests, for example, featured a stylized hourglass to symbolize that time was running out.)

Climate change became increasingly construed as an all-powerful, apocalyptic force, with temperature targets framed as humanity’s only hope for survival. Rather than advocating for new political frameworks or approaches, the need for urgent action itself became a kind of political demand. “Either we prevent a 1.5 degree of warming or we don’t. … There are no gray areas when it comes to survival,” Thunberg put it ominously to an audience at the World Economic Forum in 2019. “We are playing Russian roulette with our planet. … The battle for 1.5 degrees will be won or lost in the 2020s,” U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres warned in 2024.

If the post-Paris landscape did mark a new chapter in the history of climate politics, it was through a turn to green industrial policy: state-led efforts to structurally transform the economy toward lower-carbon energy systems. Some of the first proposals for a Green New Deal date to 2007, when economist Thomas Friedman argued for a state-directed, economywide energy transition in the name of U.S. revitalization. But in the late 2010s, talk of a Green New Deal became more closely associated with leftist programs for public provisioning and redressing economic inequality. The centrality of a Green New Deal to U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders’s 2020 presidential campaign was no accident.

With this expansion into the realm of green industrial policy, climate became inscribed within a domain of political contestation that had been effectively foreclosed when it was confined to the realm of international treaties. Suddenly, climate was subjected to classical political economy questions about coalition building and distributional politics. But it also meant that any climate policy successes would be hard-won and subject to the constraints of electoral politics, whose timescales were fundamentally incompatible with the urgency message of the mainstream climate movement.

---

Meanwhile, as the West was debating what a green energy future could look like, China was simply building it. One of the first indications that China was positioning itself as a major clean energy player came in 2006, when the 11th Five-Year Plan identified clean energy as a strategic industrial priority. In the EV sector, this translated to generous subsidies for Chinese-made vehicles and Chinese suppliers of lithium-ion batteries, combined with stiff tariffs on imported EVs. Within a decade, China successfully jump-started a domestic EV industry: In 2015 alone, Chinese plug-in EV sales jumped 343 percent; by the end of that year, BYD had become the world’s leading plug-in EV producer. A decade later, it was the world’s largest EV manufacturer by volume.

A similar story can be told about any number of Chinese-made green technologies: As of 2024, Chinese-made solar panels and battery cells accounted for 80 percent of the world market, and China accounted for about 60 percent of global wind capacity additions. The green transition is happening, just not on Western terms, under Western leadership, or for Western reasons.

China’s rise upended a central assumption about the nature of climate politics: When it came to climate action, the West would lead, and the rest would follow. The assumption was built into the original U.N. treaty architecture itself, which divided the world into the developed countries responsible for causing the problem and developing nations that would need to be cajoled and incentivized to adopt lower-carbon energy systems. Yet China’s turn to clean energy was not motivated by the normative framework of Western climate politics of net-zero pledges, carbon markets, or the moral imperative of 1.5 degrees.

In fact, China had long complained that the international treaty process was merely a pretext for constraining the global south from developing and famously derailed the COP negotiations in Copenhagen. Instead, it pursued clean energy entirely on its own terms. What’s more, China’s model of state capitalism—insulated from electoral cycles and unconstrained by the need to negotiate with private capital—had structural advantages that Western democracies could not easily replicate. Even the hard-won 2022 Inflation Reduction Act (IRA)—the most ambitious climate legislation in U.S. history, with $369 billion dedicated to onshore the various clean energy supply chains that China had come to dominate and to stimulate consumer-side demand—looked like a rounding error compared with China’s state-directed industrial behemoth, which at the time of the IRA’s passage was already producing 85 percent of the world’s solar cells and three-quarters of all lithium-ion batteries.

---

Some have suggested that China’s emergence as the decisive agent of change in the global energy transition signals a need to fundamentally rethink Western philosophies of history. But it would be more apt to say China’s rise merely exemplifies some of the paradoxes that have always been at the heart of climate politics. Favoring the survival of future generations, for example, has always been perfectly compatible with an abysmal human rights record in the present (as when BYD was accused of maintaining “slavery-like conditions” during construction of its EV factory in Brazil).

Meanwhile, even as it became evident that averting climate change would require a structural overhaul of the world economy, the West insisted that the problem could somehow be solved without threatening the prevailing global economic order. And even as climate change was framed as an existential emergency, it was met with political mechanisms—international negotiations, domestic legislation, corporate commitments—that were necessarily slow, deliberative, and subject to shifting political winds.

If there is an irony to China’s rise as a clean energy manufacturing powerhouse, it is this: The West spent three decades building the political, institutional, and financial architecture and popular demand for an energy transition. It dedicated enormous intellectual, political, diplomatic, and fiscal resources to the problem of mitigating climate change. Yet it is China that is now reaping the material benefits. It turns out, in other words, that the West was merely inventing a market for the products China now sells to the world.