Once upon a time, the collapse of the last fully intact ice shelf in the Canadian Arctic would have made news. But in 2020 it hardly receives notice, lost as it is in the din of pandemic, politics, protest, and the rest of the front page.

A sizable chunk of the known world can disappear unnoticed for another reason as well: it’s not surprising. It settles into world consciousness as a commonplace event among all the effects and drivers of global warming. On pretty much every latitude, in every ecological system, and from the largest country to the smallest island nation, some form of collapse is under way. It’s collectively global, ubiquitous, and systemic, and so must be the response. Though with a nod to local action, the climate response needs to be the most global and systemic work the world has ever done — progress must be integrated and leveraged and accelerated through shared ideas, technologies, and resources, counter-acting forces that also know no boundaries.

Meanwhile, today’s global politics are a cesspool of nationalism, antiglobalism, and enough geopolitical escalation that the term “new Cold War” is echoing from one foreign-policy Zoom webinar to another.

But as we approach the dreaded +2° climate threshold, all these usual geopolitics must stop, and must stop now — or rather, in these extraordinary times, we must convert all normal and abnormal conflicts and cross-purposes into different levels of collaboration.

It’s time for foreign-policy pragmatism like the world has never seen.

What Happened to 2016?

Four years ago, a lame duck Obama administration was piling on climate victories. Progress was in the air and the dragging climate policy anchor of the United States seemed to have been pulled up once and for all. Five days before the 2016 presidential election, Michael Brune, the Executive Director of the Sierra Club, penned an article entitled “Let’s Celebrate the Environmental Progress Made During the Last Eight Years” with unaccustomed optimism:

While President Obama will leave office with a climate legacy he can be proud of, the credit isn’t his alone. It also belongs to the people’s climate movement and the millions who worked to put him in office and keep him there, and then tirelessly pushed him to think bigger and do better. Regardless of who succeeds Obama in the Oval Office, we can count on at least one thing: The movement to protect our climate and replace dirty fuels with clean, renewable energy will only grow bigger, stronger, and even harder to ignore.

It almost felt like momentum — and global momentum at that — but it was not to last. President-Elect Trump, even before taking the reins, threatened to withdraw from the Paris Agreement and to dismantle the Obama administration’s energy and climate progress. Just a month after the election, Varum Sivaram and Sagatom Saha, fellows at the Council on Foreign Relations, expressed the feeling of the foreign policy community in Foreign Affairs. “If the Trump administration keeps those promises,” they wrote,

China will probably step into the leadership vacuum left by the United States. At first glance, that might seem like good news, since China is the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases, leads the world in the production and deployment of clean energy, and will probably meet the international climate-action pledges it has made so far. The trouble is that China would lead on climate-change issues only insofar as doing so would advance its national interests. Some of those interests, such as China’s desire to cultivate foreign markets for clean energy exports and curb domestic air pollution, line up with combatting climate change. Others, such as the incentives the country faces to export coal power plants abroad, could get in the way of reducing emissions. In some cases, it is unclear where China’s interests lie — for example, whether it wants to promote or stunt breakthrough innovations in clean-energy technologies. Still, one thing is certain: ceding climate leadership to China would be disastrous for the United States, whose diplomatic standing and position in the race to supply the world’s clean-energy needs would fall precipitously as a result.

If anything, Trump’s actions have been more comprehensive, destructive, and counter-conservative than promised, compromising both U.S. technical leadership and diplomatic power on a subject that is more existentially threatening with every news cycle. And the Covid-19 pandemic — though it was fun to see forgotten mountains when the smog cleared — has only set back climate catastrophe by three weeks, according to the WWF’s math. (Or, as always, it could also be much worse than that.)

As for China, Sivaram and Saha continued,

In a sign of its willingness to take over the mantle of climate leadership, China has strongly denounced Trump’s promises. Senior Chinese officials have urged the United States to uphold its climate commitments, and Beijing has pledged to make good on its own regardless of what the next administration does.

The opportunity to take over climate leadership from the United States would be a gift to China.

Though Trump’s threats were couched in defiant, virtuous rhetoric, they were and have been anything but bold; generally Trump’s executive actions have done little or nothing more than stopping work, undermining partnerships, and realizing Sivaram and Saha’s words as surely as if it were done on a plan. Trump installed reactionaries at the EPA, Interior, and Energy committed to government inaction at best, and likewise put the ineffectual Jared Kushner in charge of the crisis as a whole. In an age where every year brings us closer to the brink of climate disaster, the GOP chose to cede leadership to entities other than the U.S. federal government — with its most notable active effort perhaps being an attempt to turn back the clock on automotive efficiency, or to turn over public lands to corporations as if a conscious strategy to accelerate global warming.

China proceeded thus into the future with its mixture of self-serving and climate-forward motivations, further securing its place at the energy vanguard and influencing the developing nations in its sphere of influence. China a  in the environment, sustainable energy, and related economic benefits, China has continued its disciplined environmental progress during the Trump years, accele accelerating toward its climate targets and unrivaled status as global leader on lucrative sustainable energy technologies.

More Cooks in This Hot Kitchen

Of course, climate activism and action continued elsewhere in the absence of U.S. leadership. Helping matters, the cost of solar and wind power dropped below that of coal, making it easier for everyone to make prudent climate decisions without trying to be virtuous about it.

With the U.S., U.K., Brazil, and other countries foundering in passive or regressive climate politics, others stepping forward have included outspoken vulnerable nations with everything to gain from action and everything to lose from inaction; an ever-growing list of climate organizations; and gifted individual leaders from around the world. In the United States, state and local governments have stepped forward to help fill the federal vacuum and blunt its destruction. In the corporate world, 955 companies signed the Science-Based Targets Initiative, whether for selfless reasons or out of the knowledge that climate change in the end is a threat to nearly everyone’s bottom line. And while there are more top-tens of corporate climate champions than you could ever read, the bigger news is that corporate leaders more frequently find themselves making decisions that pit their bottom lines against climate priorities. We may be seeing climate-based decisions becoming more palatable in board rooms where the financial bottom line was once the only bottom line, just as we saw companies of every stripe endorsing and supporting Black Lives Matter and quickly saw others step up to help with the global pandemic response.

This coming November, should Biden win in the United States, his administration will have much to build on. And should Trump win, the unrestrained second-term president will have at least some obstacles in his apparent pursuit of >+2° global warming.

But as far as China goes, whoever is in office must replace the rhetoric of rivalry with the promise of partnership.

Business Unusual

Sivaram and Saha concluded their 2016 their article by saying,

if Washington abdicates its leadership in the fight against climate change, it would also give up its right to complain.

Abdicating leadership cost us much more than that. With four years of coordinated action squandered, we have also ceded the right to dictate the terms of engagement. In the coming years, climate stakeholders will be pressured to distance themselves from Beijing and China-based industries due to China’s treatment of its Uyghur minority, Hong Kong policy, intellectual property, territorial claims in the South China Sea, trade disputes, the Korea chess match, and any number of future crises.

But with every year another step toward doom, we don’t have the right, or the time, to keep climate on the negotiating table with these long-term arguments. If Donald Trump has shown us anything, it’s the value of a clear roadmap — and what happens when you don’t have one. Climate leaders, whether or not that includes the U.S. government, will need to join with world leaders to forge paths of partnership that lead away from hot or cold war and toward solutions to move us together away from the climate tipping point. Though we must continue leading on human rights and regain our moral leadership, this path must not bend.

Already the European Union and others are far more likely to look at China as a partner than as a foe. Behind as the U.S. now is, it needs to follow them back to cooperative and creative global leadership on a global problem in which all our stake is the same.

Who knows, a little common purpose might help reconcile the other differences as well.