https://www.realclearenergy.org/articles/2020/09/24/joe_bidens_china_dilemma_save_the_planet_or_protect_taiwan_578415.html
Is climate change an existential threat, one that overrides all other challenges? Or does an expansionist China pose a grave and growing danger to the strategic interests of the U.S.? Two questions with only one “Yes.” President Trump makes no secret of his views on China. He was one of the first public figures to realize China as an economic threat. He denounces the decision to admit China to the World Trade Organization (WTO), seeing it as a disaster for America, and especially for American workers. And it is not hard to guess where Trump resides on the continuum from climate-change-as-hoax to climate-change-as-existential threat.
By contrast, Joe Biden supported China’s accession to the WTO and has placed all his chips on the opposite end of the climate spectrum from Trump. Campaigning for the Democratic nomination, Biden tweeted his belief that climate change poses an existential threat. Since then, he has committed to implementing the most draconian greenhouse-emissions cuts ever proposed by a serious candidate for the presidency.
Global warming is, well, global. There is no point in cutting America’s carbon dioxide emissions unless the rest of the world follows suit. During his first year in the White House, Barack Obama attempted to get China to sign a treaty that included emissions targets. It ended in the fiasco of the Copenhagen climate conference in December 2009. The lesson Obama took away from Copenhagen was that Beijing held the keys to a new global climate compact. To justify the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan to sharply cut power generation emissions, there had to be a realistic prospect of a new UN climate treaty—and that meant being friendly to Beijing.