Gallagher Publishes Op-Ed FT on China’s Climate Leadership

Kevin Gallagher, Director of the Global Development Policy (GDP) Center and Professor of Global Development Policy at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies, published a recent Op-Ed on China’s emerging leadership on energy and climate change.

Gallagher’s Op-Ed, entitled “China Must Calibrate Overseas Lending Towards Paris Climate Goals,” was published in Financial Times on December 10, 2018. 

From the text of the article:

With the demise of US leadership on climate change, China enters this week’s Conference of the Parties to the Paris climate agreement poised to take the mantle as the world’s leader on energy and climate change.

In order to emerge as the leader, however, China will need to square its unrivalled domestic energy and climate policies with its foreign economic policy, which at the moment are the inverse of each other.

China should lead by example and commit to calibrating its overseas financing to the Paris Agreement. Such a policy shift would reap enormous gains for China, host countries and the global climate alike.

China’s domestic energy and climate change commitments could not stand in greater contrast with those of the US. Last month US president Donald Trump denied his own administration’s report on the costs of climate change to his country as he continued to roll back innovative economic policies for clean energy and cars in America.

Gallagher currently serves as co-chair of the T-20 Argentina task force on “An International Financial Architecture for Stability and Development” to advise the G-20 and its members on financial infrastructure and monetary policy globally. He also served on the U.S. Department of State’s Investment Subcommittee of the Advisory Committee on International Economic Policy and the International Investment Division of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development.  He has served as a visiting or adjunct professor at the Paul Nitze School for Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University, the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University; El Colegio de Mexico in Mexico; Tsinghua University in China; and the Center for State and Society in Argentina. You can follow him on Twitter @KevinPGallagher.